Those Extraordinary Twins: Mark Twain's First Draft of Pudd'nhead Wilson

Written by Mark Twain

Narrated by Richard Henzel

A man of many firsts, Mark Twain was the first author to use the typewriter and the first person to have a telephone in his home (which no doubt made him the first person to swear at tech support!). He patented the accordion file, the fountain pen, and adjustable suspenders. And when he published "deleted scenes" from Pudd'nhead Wilson as Those Extraordinary Twins he became the first publisher to include "bonus tracks" as well as the finished work.

As Twain said: "As a short tale grows into a long tale, the original intention (or motif) is apt to get abolished and find itself superseded by a quite different one. It was so in the case of a magazine sketch which I once started to write - a funny and fantastic sketch about a prince and a pauper....

Much the same thing happened with Pudd'nhead Wilson, because it changed itself from a farce to a tragedy while I was going along with it - a most embarrassing circumstance....it was not one story, but two stories tangled together; and they obstructed and interrupted each other at every turn and created no end of confusion and annoyance. So I pulled out the farce and left the tragedy."

(P)2007 Big Happy Family LLC

• Language: English
• Publisher: Big Happy Family
• Release date: Jul 15, 2009
• ISBN: 9780974723723

Mark Twain

Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835, left school at age 12. His career encompassed such varied occupations as printer, Mississippi riverboat pilot, journalist, travel writer, and publisher, which furnished him with a wide knowledge of humanity and the perfect grasp of local customs and speech manifested in his writing. It wasn't until The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), that he was recognized by the literary establishment as one of the greatest writers America would ever produce. Toward the end of his life, plagued by personal tragedy and financial failure, Twain grew more and more cynical and pessimistic. Though his fame continued to widen--Yale and Oxford awarded him honorary degrees--he spent his last years in gloom and desperation, but he lives on in American letters as "the Lincoln of our literature."