The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg and Other Stories and Essays (1900)

by Mark Twain, Shelley Fisher Fishkin (Series Editor), Jeffrey Rubin-Dorsky (Primary Contributor)

1901. Illustrated. As humorist, narrator, and social observer, Twain (Samuel Clemens) is unsurpassed in American literature. His novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a masterpiece of humor, characterization, and realism, has been called the first, and perhaps the best, modern American novel. This volume is a collection of previously published stories. Contents: The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg; My Debut as a Literary Person; From the London Times of 1904; At the Appetite-Cure; My First Lie, and How I Got Out of It; Is He Living or Is He Dead?; The Esquimau Maiden's Romance; How to Tell a Story; About Play-Acting; Concerning the Jews; Stirring Times in Austria; The Austrian Edison Keeping School Again; Traveling with a Reformer; Private History of the Jumping Frog Story; and My Boyhood Dreams. See other titles by this author available from Kessinger Publishing.

Genres: Short Stories, Literature, Fiction

528 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1902

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

Samuel Langhorne Clemens, known by the pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer, humorist and essayist. He was praised as the "greatest humorist the United States has produced," with William Faulkner calling him "the father of American literature." His novels include The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), with the latter often called the "Great American Novel." Twain also wrote A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) and Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894), and co-wrote The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873) with Charles Dudley Warner.

Reviews

[Illiterate]

The title story is a terrific satire on smug moralism. Other highlights include a couple of satires on fads.

[Bill Ibelle]

Interesting lead story, but overall the book, with it's collected essays and journalism is not one of Twains best. The additional material is mostly second tier Twain.

However, the main story is thought provoking and an interesting commentary about the arrogance and ultimately quite thin morals of mankind. The arrogance of morality and its deep and ultimate self-delusion is the subject of Twaine’s tale of a town that has an inflated opinion of its own righteousness and incorruptibility. Sound familiar? In his latter life Twain had become very cynical about the United States and its is self-deluded belief that it was an ethical state above all others. In this tiny, impeccably honest town, every single citizen, every man and woman of the many characters who play a part in the story, succumb to lying and deceit to get their hands on the sack full of coins delivered by a mysterious stranger. Good simple people wring their hands and wrestle with self-doubt and self-loathing as they struggle with temptation, but not a single one emerges from the test untarnished.

An interesting read even though allegory is not my favorite form of fiction.

The rest of the material in this volume is pretty spotty as it is really a collection of miscellaneous reporting, essays, and stories that have were not among his most notable.

[David]

This is a very interesting collection of stories and essays by Mark Twain. Many of them were magazine submissions but overall, I enjoyed them. Twain's honesty and pessimism about the human race comes through loud and clear in these stories.