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In the sleepy Missouri town of Dawson's Landing in 1830, Roxy, an enslaved woman who is one-sixteenth Black and looks white, fears that her baby son will one…
In the sleepy Missouri town of Dawson's Landing in 1830, Roxy, an enslaved woman who is one-sixteenth Black and looks white, fears that her baby son will one day be sold 'down the river'. So she switches him in the cradle with her master's baby, born the same day, and the two boys grow up in each other's places: the false heir becomes a spoiled, cruel gambler, the true one a slave. Only David Wilson, a clever lawyer whom the town thinks a fool, holds the means to discover the truth, through his odd hobby of collecting fingerprints.
Context and significance
Mark Twain published the novel in 1894. Beneath its comedy lies a bitter satire of slavery and of the very idea of race, since the town can tell the two boys apart only by the labels it has given them. It was also one of the first novels in which fingerprints solve a crime. Read Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and see Twain's life.
About the author
Samuel Clemens (1835–1910) grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, on the banks of the Mississippi, and worked as a printer's apprentice, a steamboat pilot, a silver prospector in Nevada and a newspaper reporter before he became Mark Twain. A comic story about a jumping frog made his name in 1865, and his lectures and travel books made him the most famous American writer of his time.