The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg | Author Biography

The son of John Marshall Clemens, a judge, and Jane Lampton Clemens in Hannibal, Missouri, Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835-1910) adopted the pseudonym Mark Twain when he began to write professionally. Before beginning his literary career, Clemens held diverse jobs, ranging from riverboat pilot and occasional gold-miner to journeyman printer and journalist. He spent much of his early adulthood traveling up and down the Mississippi River by steamboat and throughout the western frontier with his brother Orion, who became Nevada's secretary of territory in 1861.

Mark Twain
Mark Twain

Clemens' s earliest works include a series of letters published in regional newspapers that reported the risk and adventure of life on the frontier. Sensing America's appetite for "news," especially the sensational kind, Clemens often peppered his reports with outlandish hoaxes and tall tales, which often caused controversy as readers assumed they were true. A headline Clemens wrote in 1853 for his brother's Hannibal newspaper, Journal, evinces his penchant for irony, comedy, and good-natured satire: ‘‘Terrible Accident! 500 Men Killed and Missing!’’ He explains in the subsequent article, ‘‘We had set the above head up, expecting (of course) to use it, but as the accident hasn't yet happened, we'll say 'To be continued.'’’ Clemens first signed his pen name in 1863 to his ‘‘Carson City Letters’’ series that appeared in Virginia City's Territorial Enterprise. In 1865, Clemens as Twain published ‘‘Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog,’’ his first short story.

Astounding for both its quantity and quality, Twain's work is best known for its humorous rendering of human imperfection. While his early novels, short stories, essays and public lectures poke fun at human fallibility with delight and good nature, his later writings assume a moralistic tone, including such works such as What is Man? (1898), the collected fragments that were to make up The Mysterious Stranger (1916), and ‘‘The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg’’ (1899). Critics detect an underlying "deterministic'' philosophy in his later works. Determinism asserts that humans refuse to accept their inherently sinful nature, which inevitably leads to a moral fall. Pointing to the edifying benefits of sin, some critics read stories like ‘‘The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg’’ as an expostulation of ‘‘the fortunate fall’’ myth. Scholars often attribute Twain's gloomy outlook at the time to personal troubles. Recently bankrupted by investments in the failed Paige typesetting machine, Twain lost his daughter Susy to meningitis in 1896, while he was in Europe on a lecture tour to satisfy his creditor's demands. Critics also sense optimism in his later moralistic writings. Similar in this respect to his earlier works, he notes in his Autobiography that solid morals always inform worthy and lasting humor. Otherwise, humor is merely "decoration’’ and "fragrance." Twain writes: ‘‘Humor must not professedly teach, and it must not professedly preach, but it must do both if it would last forever.’’