Pudd’nhead Wilson

In the slaveholding Missouri river town of Dawson’s Landing, an enslaved woman named Roxy — so light-skinned she could pass for white — makes a desperate choice. To save her infant son from ever being sold down the river, she switches him in the cradle with her master’s own child. The babies are indistinguishable; no one suspects; and the true heir is raised as a slave while the slave’s son is raised as a gentleman.

Twenty years on, the boy reared in privilege has become a cowardly, gambling wastrel who robs and murders his benefactor. Suspicion falls on two visiting Italian twins — until David “Pudd’nhead” Wilson, a lawyer the town has dismissed as a fool, solves the crime with a method almost no one has heard of: the fingerprint. In a devastating courtroom climax, Wilson exposes both the killer and the long-buried switch of the infants, and rights the record at the cost of everyone it touches.

Written in 1893 and published in 1894, Pudd’nhead Wilson is the late Twain at his bleakest and most modern — a biting, ironic fable of slavery, identity, and the question of nature against nurture, each chapter headed by the savage aphorisms of Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar, and built around one of the earliest fingerprint mysteries in fiction.

This edition pairs the complete text with an editor’s foreword on the book’s strange composition, its attack on the social fiction of race, and its bleak irony, together with a biographical note, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection.