Pudd’nhead Wilson

Dawson’s Landing, Missouri, 1830. Roxy, an enslaved woman whose infant son can pass as white, secretly exchanges him with the child of her enslaver to protect him from being sold down the river. The boys grow into the identities society assigns them: Chambers is raised as an enslaved servant, while Roxy’s son becomes the privileged and reckless Tom Driscoll.

Years later, debt, theft and blackmail culminate in the murder of Judge Driscoll. David “Pudd’nhead” Wilson, dismissed by the town as an eccentric, uses the fingerprint records he has collected since the boys’ infancy to expose both the killer and the exchange. The novel makes race, freedom and inheritance matters of law and performance rather than biology. This edition also includes Those Extraordinary Twins, Twain’s comic reworking of material separated from the original manuscript.