Pudd'nhead Wilson Lesson Plan

In many respects, Mark Twain's books are unlike any of his contemporaries, especially when it comes to race. As Langston Hughes wrote in his introduction to Pudd'nhead Wilson in 1959, "Mark Twain, in his presentation of Negroes as human beings, stands head and shoulders above the other Southern writers of his times, even such distinguished ones as Joel Chandler Harris, F. Hopkins Smith, and Thomas Nelson Page. It was a period when most writers who included Negro characters in their work at all, were given to presenting the slave as ignorant and happy, the freed men of color as ignorant and miserable, and all Negroes as either comic servants on the one hand or dangerous brutes on the...