The Mysterious Stranger, and Other Stories

The Mysterious Stranger is a novel attempted by the American author Mark Twain. He worked on it intermittently from 1897 through 1908. Twain wrote multiple versions of the story; each involves a supernatural character called "Satan" or "No. 44". All the versions remained unfinished. "The Mysterious Stranger" provides a vehicle to examine the thinking of Twain as an elderly man, who expressed his unrestrained philosophical and religious views as he reflected on the multiple tragedies of his life and confronted the imminence of his own mortality. In ''The Mysterious Stranger,'' Twain uses magic as an allegory for the realm of dreams and the imagination. In the Dream-World of our imaginations, he suggests, we can do and be anything, as if by magic. Twain fills his tale with numerous magical occurrences.