>As for _Mysterious Stranger_, does anybody teach that >anymore in a Twain class? What does one teach for the later >mood? > >Cameron Nickels >James Madison University This year I taught No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger (UC Berkeley paperback) for the first time as part of my "Mark Twain and the Gilded Age" course here at Stanford. I was a little wary that students would find it too strange or sardonic or incomprehensible. To my delight they loved it and declared it one of their favorite Twain works, and after encountering so many works of Twain they were excited to read something so wacky that smacked so much of contemporary science fiction and fantasy. They were also bemused by all the philosophical and religious questions raised in the novel. This was followed by selections from the recent compendium The Bible According to Mark Twain and other sources (Captain Stormfield, Letters from the Earth, Reflections on Religion, Little Bessie, Extract from Adam's Diary, Eve's Diary), The Man that Corrupted H., and a collection of late political writings (The War Prayer, The United States of Lyncherdom, Concerning the Jews, To The Person Sitting in Darkness, other writings on the Philippines, etc.). (Earlier we had read other later works, such as "My First Lie," "The Turning Point of My Life") Students suggested that we read those pieces BEFORE reading No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger, making it the last book in the course because, as they remarked, after No. 44 everything else seemed anti-climactic. What an unexpected response! In the past I did teach The Mysterious Stranger edited by Paine and Duneka with the explanation of its provenance. Now that we have more than 30 years for the shock to wear off that Paine and Duneka took such liberties with Twain's text, we can evaluate it with perhaps cooler heads. The P-D editing is actually not so far off from the kinds of editing and self-censorship Twain would have done, and the spliced-together text does pull together a relatively coherent narrative. So, just so long as an explanation is given, I still think some teachers, depending on the circumstances, can find it useful for the classroom. However, with the unexpected response to No. 44, I am now toying with the idea of also including The Chronicle of Young Satan (making the P-D version completely irrelevant). Incorporating The Chronicle involves some serious xerox work, since there is no paperback edition available, and the Gibson collection of The Mysterious Stranger manuscripts, while available in hardback, is too costly for students. Hilton Obenzinger