BOOKS FROM 1900
Mark Twain
The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg
(1900)
Shadowed by domestic tragedy and the looming threat of bankruptcy, the ebullient humorist Mark Twain emerged as a dark satirist in the mid-1890's. Twain spoke briefly of "the damned human race." His close friend William Dean Howells wrote that this was a period in his life when the "night was blackest."
The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg is a morality tale of somber dimensions. It has been called Twain's greatest short story. According to Van Wyck Brooks, "Not till then ... did he ever again openly and on a large scale attack the spiritual integrity of industrial America." After his death, Howells wrote that Twain "was sole, incomparable, the Lincoln of our literature."
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