The town of Hadleyburg has spent a century building an immaculate reputation: the most honest community in America, a place where no man has ever been tempted, because temptation was never offered. Then a stranger arrives with a sack of gold and a simple test - reward the man who once showed him kindness - and the entire social order collapses into lies and shame. Nineteen of the town's most respected couples step forward with fabricated tales of helpfulness, their desperate greed laying bare everything the founding fathers pretended not to know about human nature. Written in the bitter twilight of Mark Twain's career, during exile in Europe and soon after burying his daughter, this novella burns with a cold, precise fury. The stranger remains throughout either Satan or a crusader for truth - Twain refuses to resolve the ambiguity, and the reader is left to wonder whether Hadleyburg was destroyed or finally freed. The wit is surgical, the social satire withering, and the ending offers no comfort: virtue that has never been tested is merely weakness waiting to be discovered.
