The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg

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The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg is a piece of short fiction by Mark Twain. It first appeared in Harper's Monthly in December 1899, and was subsequently published by Harper Collins in the collection The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg and Other Stories and Sketches (1900).

[edit] Synopsis

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

In the story, Hadleyburg is called "the most honest and upright town in all the region round about." However, it causes an unnamed offense to a stranger, who in revenge purposes to corrupt the town. Coming back incognito, he deposits a sack at the home of an old cashier of the town bank and then disappears. Attached is a note purportedly from a foreigner who wishes to repay a kindness to one of the citizens of Hadleyburg with the sack's contents, "gold coin weighing ninety pounds four ounces." The note says that the Hadleyburg citizen made a remark to the foreigner that changed his life, and asks that an advertisement be published (or that the search for the man be conducted in secret) in the local newspaper directing the person who made the remark to submit it in a sealed envelope to the local pastor, Rev. Burgess; if what is written by the person tallies with the remark as written in a sealed envelope inside the sack, that person gets the gold. The remainder of the story shows the citizens of Hadleyburg vying to obtain the gold, through many undignified and often self-deceiving stratagems.

Works of Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)

Fiction: Advice for Little Girls • The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County • General Washington's Negro Body-Servant • My Late Senatorial Secretaryship • Mark Twain's (Burlesque) Autobiography and First Romance • The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today • The Adventures of Tom Sawyer • 1601: Conversation, as it was by the Social Fireside, in the Time of the Tudors • The Prince and the Pauper • Adventures of Huckleberry Finn • A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court • The American Claimant • Tom Sawyer Abroad • Pudd'nhead Wilson • Tom Sawyer, Detective • Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc • The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg • A Double Barrelled Detective Story • Edmund Burke on Croker and Tammany • A Dog's Tale • King Leopold's Soliloquy • The War Prayer • The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • A Horse's Tale • Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven • Letters from the Earth • The Mysterious Stranger • No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger
Non Fiction: The Innocents Abroad • Memoranda (monthly column) • Roughing It • Old Times on the Mississippi • A Tramp Abroad • Life on the Mississippi • How to Tell a Story and other Essays • Following the Equator • What Is Man? • Christian Science • Is Shakespeare Dead? • Queen Victoria's Jubilee • Mark Twain's Autobiography • Mark Twain's Notebook • Mark Twain's Weapons of Satire: Anti-Imperialist Writings on the Philippine-American War • The Bible According to Mark Twain: Writings on Heaven, Eden, and the Flood
Short Story Books: Sketches New and Old • A True Story and the Recent Carnival of Crime • Punch, Brothers, Punch! and other Sketches • Merry Tales • The £1,000,000 Bank Note and Other New Stories