Mark Twain's darkest novel combines a murder mystery and courtroom drama with a provocative fable about race, identity, and slavery. A VINTAGE CLASSICS REISSUE.
Twain's plot is set in motion when a slave named Roxy, desperate to save her light-skinned infant son Chambers from the horrors of slavery, switches him in the cradle with her master's baby, Tom. Roxy's child, now known as Tom, grows up to be a spoiled, privileged white man, who is horrified when Roxy reveals his identity to him. He nearly gets away with murder, but his downfall comes in the form of a clever but eccentric lawyer, nicknamed "Puddn'head" Wilson by those skeptical of his faith in the newfangled theory of fingerprints. Twain's novel was the first ever to use fingerprinting to solve a crime, but its significance goes much further as an investigation into the nature of identity. When the two men are forced to change places again, the slave Chambers finds himself exiled to a white world where he will never feel at ease, while Tom discovers that his newfound value as human property outweighs his guilt, and his sentence is commuted so he can be sold down the river. Despite its humor and the murder-mystery neatness of its denouement, Pudd'nhead Wilson is a tragedy that refuses easy answers.
