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    Those Extraordinary Twins
    Those Extraordinary Twins
    Those Extraordinary Twins
    Ebook82 pages1 hour

    Those Extraordinary Twins

    By Mark Twain

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    Mark Twain was born on November 30th, 1835, when Halley's Comet shone in the night sky, and died April 21, 1910, during the return of the same comet. Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens and grew up in Hannibal, Missouri near the banks of the Mississippi River, a setting displayed prominently in his best works. Twain met a great deal of literary success during his lifetime, and is to this day regarded as one of the greatest North American writers of all time. He was highly popular as a literary humorist, but financial difficulties led to an increased pessimism in his later works. One of these works, "Those Extraordinary Twins", was intended to be a comical story about conjoined twins, based on Giovanni and Giacomo Tocci, who lived in 19th century Italy. As the work evolved from farce to tragedy, Twain reconsidered his initial plans, splitting the work into two tales, the first being "Pudd'nhead Wilson".
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDigireads.com Publishing
    Release dateJan 1, 2011
    ISBN9781596256507
    Author

    Mark Twain

    Mark Twain, who was born Samuel L. Clemens in Missouri in 1835, wrote some of the most enduring works of literature in the English language, including The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc was his last completed book—and, by his own estimate, his best. Its acquisition by Harper & Brothers allowed Twain to stave off bankruptcy. He died in 1910. 

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    • 4/5
      Pudd'nhead Wilson can be described as Mark Twain's attack on racial prejudice in the guise of a mystery. The novel begins with a young slave woman, fearing for her infant's son's life, exchanging her light-skinned child with her master's. From this rather simple premise Mark Twain has created an entertaining, funny, yet biting novel. On its surface, Pudd'nhead Wilson possesses all the elements of a mystery: reversed identities, a horrible crime, an eccentric detective, a suspenseful courtroom drama, and a surprising solution. Yet it is not a mystery novel. This book reveals the real criminal--society, and racial prejudice and slavery are the crimes. 4 out of 5 stars.

    Book preview

    Those Extraordinary Twins - Mark Twain

    THOSE EXTRAORDINARY TWINS

    BY MARK TWAIN

    A Digireads.com Book

    Digireads.com Publishing

    Print ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-4149-4

    Ebook ISBN 13: 978-1-59625-650-7

    This edition copyright © 2011

    Please visit www.digireads.com

    CONTENTS

    CHAPTER I. THE TWINS AS THEY REALLY WERE

    CHAPTER II. MA COOPER GETS ALL MIXED UP

    CHAPTER III. ANGELO IS BLUE

    CHAPTER IV. SUPERNATURAL CHRONOMETRY

    CHAPTER V. GUILT AND INNOCENCE FINELY BLENT

    CHAPTER VI. THE AMAZING DUEL

    CHAPTER VII. LUIGI DEFIES GALEN

    CHAPTER VIII. BAPTISM OF THE BETTER HALF

    CHAPTER IX. THE DRINKLESS DRUNK

    CHAPTER X. SO THEY HANGED LUIGI

    FINAL REMARKS

    THOSE EXTRAORDINARY TWINS

    A man who is not born with the novel-writing gift has a troublesome time of it when he tries to build a novel. I know this from experience. He has no clear idea of his story; in fact he has no story. He merely has some people in his mind, and an incident or two, also a locality. He knows these people, he knows the selected locality, and he trusts that he can plunge those people into those incidents with interesting results. So he goes to work. To write a novel? No—that is a thought which comes later; in the beginning he is only proposing to tell a little tale; a very little tale; a six-page tale. But as it is a tale which he is not acquainted with, and can only find out what it is by listening as it goes along telling itself, it is more than apt to go on and on and on till it spreads itself into a book. I know about this, because it has happened to me so many times.

    And I have noticed another thing: that as the short tale grows into a long tale, the original intention (or motif) is apt to get abolished and find itself superseded by a quite different one. It was so in the case of a magazine sketch which I once started to write—a funny and fantastic sketch about a prince and a pauper; it presently assumed a grave cast of its own accord, and in that new shape spread itself out into a book. Much the same thing happened with Pudd'nhead Wilson. I had a sufficiently hard time with that tale, because it changed itself from a farce to a tragedy while I was going along with it—a most embarrassing circumstance. But what was a great deal worse was, that it was not one story, but two stories tangled together; and they obstructed and interrupted each other at every turn and created no end of confusion and annoyance. I could not offer the book for publication, for I was afraid it would unseat the reader's reason. I did not know what was the matter with it, for I had not noticed, as yet, that it was two stories in one. It took me months to make that discovery. I carried the manuscript back and forth across the Atlantic two or three times, and read it and studied over it on shipboard; and at last I saw where the difficulty lay. I had no further trouble. I pulled one of the stories out by the roots, and left the other one—a kind of literary Caesarean operation.

    Would the reader care to know something about the story which I pulled out? He has been told many a time how the born-and-trained novelist works. Won't he let me round and complete his knowledge by telling him how the jack-leg does it?

    Originally the story was called Those Extraordinary Twins. I meant to make it very short. I had seen a picture of a youthful Italian freak or freaks which was—or which were—on exhibition in our cities—a combination consisting of two heads and four arms joined to a single body and a single pair of legs—and I thought I would write an extravagantly fantastic little story with this freak of nature for hero—or heroes—a silly young miss for heroine, and two old ladies and two boys for the minor parts. I lavishly elaborated these people and their doings, of course. But the tale kept spreading along, and spreading along, and other people got to intruding themselves and taking up more and more room with their talk and their affairs. Among them came a stranger named Pudd'nhead Wilson, and a woman named Roxana; and presently the doings of these two pushed up into prominence a young fellow named Tom Driscoll, whose proper place was away in the obscure background. Before the book was half finished those three were taking things almost entirely into their own hands and working the whole tale as a private venture of their own—a tale which they had nothing at all to do with, by rights.

    When the book was finished and I came to look around to see what had become of the team I had originally started out with—Aunt Patsy Cooper, Aunt Betsy Hale, the two boys, and Rowena the light-weight heroine—they were nowhere to be seen; they had disappeared from the story some time or other. I hunted about and found them—found them stranded, idle, forgotten, and permanently useless. It was very awkward. It was awkward all around; but more particularly in the case of Rowena, because there was a love-match on, between her and one of the twins that constituted the freak, and I had worked it up to a blistering heat and thrown in a quite dramatic love-quarrel, wherein Rowena scathingly denounced her betrothed for getting drunk, and scoffed at his explanation of how it had happened, and wouldn't listen to it, and had driven him from her in the usual forever way; and now here she sat crying and broken-hearted; for she had found that he had spoken only the truth; that it was not he, but the other half of the freak, that had drunk the liquor that made him drunk; that her half was a prohibitionist and had never drunk a drop in his life, and, although tight as a brick three days in the week, was wholly innocent of blame; and indeed, when sober, was constantly doing all he could to reform his brother, the other half, who never got any satisfaction out of drinking, anyway, because liquor never affected him. Yes, here she was, stranded with that deep injustice of hers torturing her poor torn heart.

    I didn't know what to do with her. I was as sorry for her as

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