Unity in “No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger” and Mark Twain’s Debt to Christian Science.

Authors

Jeb Midyette, University of Alabama at Birmingham

Document Type

Thesis

Date of Award

1983

Abstract

Since 1969 the traditional assessment of the final fifteen years of Mark Twain’s career has undergone a reversal because of the availability of the original Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts. These manuscripts, for the first time, presented three distinct versions of Twain’s mysterious stranger stories. Study of these texts has revealed that after Twain’s death in 1910, his editor, Albert Bigelow Paine, without Twain’s prior consent, combined the body of ”The Chronicle of Young Satan,” the earliest version of the three different texts, with the conclusion of ”No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger," the final version. The novel, published in 1916 by F.A. Duneka and called The Mysterious Stranger, confounded Twain experts for over half a century because "Chronicle," written between 1897 and 1900, and the conclusion of "No. 44," written in 1904, express dissimilar sentiments.

Comments

MA - Master of Arts; ProQuest publication number 31751900

Recommended Citation

Midyette, Jeb, "Unity in “No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger” and Mark Twain’s Debt to Christian Science." (1983). All ETDs from UAB. 6980.
https://digitalcommons.library.uab.edu/etd-collection/6980