Trivia / The Mysterious Stranger

• Creator Breakdown: Following the death of his daughters and his bankruptcy, Twain's final years weren't terribly kind to him. The Mysterious Stranger was written at a time when he felt most hostile to mortality and organized religion, and it shows. His follow-up, Letters From the Earth, is a kind of Spiritual Successor, and is even more bitter and iconoclastic, to the point his surviving child asked that the book not be published until decades after the fact.
• Died During Production: Twain wrote three different versions of the story, but passed before any version saw a polished cut.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: Good luck trying to find a decent copy of the Live-Action Adaptation. It was only ever released on VHS, years ago. Even versions on the Internet are scarce.
• What Could Have Been: The first version of the story, called 'The Chronicles of Young Satan', was set in Missouri in the 1840s, with Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn playing supporting roles. The second version, called 'Schoolhouse Hill' involved Twain himself and his friends and family encountering Young Satan, who had come to Hannibal, Missouri and later been converted to Methodism. A later version, called the 'Print Shop', or 'Number 44: The Mysterious Stranger', was based around Young Satan becoming a printer's devil, and showing the worthlessness and futility of human existence by having him create and then destroy copies of the townsfolk. The best-known version is an amalgam of the three, crafted by Twain's literary executor Albert Bigelow Paine in the sixties. Some modern editions, though, are based on either one of the three original manuscripts.

---