Pudd'nhead Wilson (Annotated)

Pudd'nhead Wilson is one of Mark Twain's most unsettling late works, a novel that begins in the comic register of a Mississippi River town and gradually darkens into a forensic examination of race, identity, slavery, and social performance. Its plot turns on an infant exchange between a white child and a child legally defined as enslaved, exposing the absurd brutality of racial classification in t...