Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Terence J. Matheson

Critical Essay by Terence J. Matheson

SOURCE: “The Devil and Philip Traum: Twain's Satiric Purposes in The Mysterious Stranger,” in Markham Review, Vol. 12, Fall, 1982, pp. 5-11.

In the following essay, Matheson concentrates on Mark Twain's ironic treatment of Satan in The Mysterious Stranger.

It is now generally known that the version of Mark Twain's The Mysterious Stranger familiar to most readers is the product of considerable editorial liberties taken by the author's literary executor, Albert Bigelow Paine, and his publisher Frederick A. Duneka, who worked extensively on Twain's unfinished manuscripts in order to create a marketable product. Paine and Duneka, it has been proved,¹ were responsible for deleting large sections from the original, adding material of their own, and in general changing the text to produce a work wherein the author's original purposes have been somewhat obscured. Given this, it is not surprising that many critics have turned to events from Twain's later life...
(read more)