Who Cares Who Wrote The Mysterious Stranger?

Once regarded as a significant late novel by Mark Twain, the 1916 publication The Mysterious Stranger: A Romance has been neglected by most critics since unacknowledged posthumous alterations by its editors were discovered in the 1960s. However, the novel is itself engaged with the issue of authorship, suggesting that too much deference to a powerful authorial voice creates ethical problems, causing individuals to forsake responsibility for making their world meaningful. The neglect of The Mysterious Stranger has been unfortunate, in part, for reasons that are thematized in the novel: in discounting a work because it is not authentically Twain’s, critics make a comparable mistake to that of the novel’s characters, who uncritically accept the pronouncements of the protagonist, young Satan. The 1916 version, in preference to the admittedly more authentic manuscript fragments since published, merits scholarly reconsideration as an epistemological novel, asking readers to discover what is true by eliminating from consideration all that is capable of being doubted.