The Mysterious Stranger
This gathering of Mark Twain’s late fiction is headed by the title novella, set in a drowsy Austrian village where a beautiful, easy-mannered boy who calls himself Satan appears among a group of children. He works casual miracles and speaks with chilling honesty about cruelty, religion, and the ‘moral sense’ that Twain believed made people worse than any animal. The shorter pieces gathered alongside it share the same dark, questioning mood of his final years. Far from the sunny humor of his boyhood tales, this is Twain at his most bleak and philosophical, closing on one of the most haunting passages he ever wrote about the illusion of reality itself. A free PDF and EPUB edition is available here.
About the Author
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, was born in 1835 in Florida, Missouri, and grew up in Hannibal on the banks of the Mississippi. Most of his fiction would later draw on that childhood, sometimes directly. He worked as a printer’s apprentice, then…
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