Mark Twain, Immigration, and the American Narrative

In No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger and other late works, Mark Twain explores the disruptions to prevailing narratives of nationality and race caused by novel patterns of immigration to the United States in his last years. Twain's texts play on such matters as labor unions' attempts to limit immigration, schemes for issuing identification numbers to members of migrant populations, and anxieties about assimilated immigrants' passing for Anglo-Americans. Marking 44 as a Jew, Twain shows that immigrants can lay bare the contingent nature of all communities whatever, and thus moves towards a liberating but disorienting form of social constructionism.