The Mysterious Stranger

MARK TWAIN, pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835-1910), born in Florida, Missouri, of a Virginian family, and brought up in Hannibal, Missouri. After his father´s death in 1847, he was apprenticed to a printer, and wrote for his brother´s newspaper. Between 1857 and 1861, he was a pilot on the Mississippi. From 1862 he worked as a newspaper correspondent for various Nevada and Californian magazines. His first successful story was “Jim Smiley and his Jumping Frog” (1865), published in the New York Saturday Press, which established him as a leading humorist; a reputation consolidated by “The Innocents Abroad” (1869). Twain created the myth of the Southern gentleman that did much to precipitate the Civil War.
“The Mysterious Stranger” (1916), is a tale set in 16th-cent Austria, in which Satan appears as a morally indifferent visitor, to reveal the hypocrisies and stupidities of the village.