In 1983 Hershel Parker concluded that the published version of Pudd'nhead Wilson is a “flawed text” and “patently unreadable.” Susan Gillman and Forrest Robinson, in their introduction to Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson: Race, Conflict, and Culture (1990) offer a corrective to Parker: “we read the incoherence in Twain's narrative not as aesthetic failure but as political symptom,” a window into “the nineteenth-century political unconscious.” Yet even in this compelling collection of essays, the editors concede, “There is no real disagreement, after all, that Pudd'nhead Wilson is a ‘mess.’” In spring 2024 the editors of the Mark Twain Project, led by editor Benjamin Griffin, published the authoritative version of Pudd'nhead Wilson with Those Extraordinary Twins. Griffin illuminates this messy, flawed, glorious, operatic, shifting narrative, making it both readable and revelatory. Very few works change the course of Twain scholarship; this latest contribution from the Mark Twain Project is one of...

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