The year 2010 is special for fans of Mark Twain because it includes not only the 175th anniversary of his birth on November 30, but also because it included the 100th anniversary of his death this past April 21. What has made this year extraordinary for Twain afficianados was the release of a revised and completely uncensored edition of volume 1 of his autobiography only a couple of weeks ago. Although I have not investigated this 700+ page book beyond picking it up to see how heavy it was, my understanding from the reviews I have read is that Twain did not hold back from dishing the dirt on his contemporaries; the reason he imposed the 100 year delay for its publication was to ensure that everyone he had written about would not be around to read this final uncensored version.
To celebrate Twain's birthday year, my library's book group read both Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Pudd'nhead Wilson, works that most of us had not picked up since our junior or senior high school days. Time has most definitely not dimmed the brilliance of Twain's social commentary; his fierce oppostion to the practice of slavery still burns through the pages. It is therefore most unfortunate that the frequent appearance of the "n" word , used by Twain as an accurate depiction of how people in slave states spoke, gets in the way of some contemporary readers' ability to understand and appreciate the brilliance of Twain's literary excoriation of the practice. Nonetheless, Twain's brilliant sense of humor jumps off the pages as sharp as ever, with observations about the human condition that are just as accurate now as they were more than a hundred years ago.
It was a very pleasant surprise, as I was re-reading Pudd'nhead Wilsonfor the first time in more than 40 years, to discover that this short novel is actually categorized by some scholars as a piece of crime fiction. Although the ostensible focus of this novella is to make a strong statement against the practice of slavery, much of the action focuses on the eccentricities of the title character, a lawyer who is newly arrived in town and who has earned the nickname "Pudd'nhead" in no small measure due to his interest in the newfangled science of fingerprint identification. Remarkably, Pudd'nhead Wilson was published in 1883, only three years after the publication of the first scholarly article that addressed the possibility of using the study of fingerprints for the purpose of solving crime. It is therefore probable that the vast majority of those who read Pudd'nhead Wilson when it was first published considered the description of a character who used small glass plates to collect the fingerprints of everyone in town, slaves included, to be just another of Twain's fanciful inventions.
I am currently three quarters of the way through the audiobook of Faithful Place, by Tama French, a recently published (and absolutely wonderful) mystery novel in which the absence of fingerprints on a particular piece of evidence is continuing to propel the action forward. It stands as additional evidence of just how much ahead of his time Mark Twain truly was.
Happy Birthday, Mr. Twain! May your writing live on in libraries forever and ever.
