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Essay on The Mysterious Stranger
Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910), better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was a famous and popular American humorist, novelist, writer and lecturer.
At his peak, he was probably the most popular American celebrity of his time. William Faulkner wrote he was "the first truly American writer, and all of us since are his heirs." Clemens maintained that the name "Mark Twain" came from his years on the riverboat, where two fathoms (12 ft, approximately 3.7 m) or "safe water" was measured on the sounding line, was marked by calling "mark twain". But it is often thought that the name actually came from his wilder days in the West, where he would buy two drinks and tell the bartender to "mark twain" on his tab. The true origin is unknown. In addition to Mark Twain, Clemens used the pseudonym "Sieur Louis de Conte".
The Mysterious Stranger is an unfinished work written by the American author Mark Twain that was worked on periodically from roughly 1890 up until his death in 1910. The body of work is a serious social commentary by Twain addressing his ideas of the Moral Sense and the "damned human race." A "complete" version was published posthumously in 1916 by Twain's biographer Albert Bigelow Paine under the name "The Mysterious Stranger, A Romance," but this version is under scrutiny concerning the extent of editing performed on Twain's manuscripts by Paine. The published version is a novella, and may be easily read in a day.
Twain actually wrote multiple versions of this story, each unfinished and each involving the character of Satan. The first substantial version is commonly referred to as "The Chronicle of Young Satan" and tells of the adventures of Satan, the sinless nephew of the real Satan, in an Austrian village in the Middle Ages...........
