proto-Pynchon: Twain's The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg....

[Mark Kohut]

*Walter Kirn: *It sure does. And how many writers? None since. Maybe,
weirdly, the kind of cynicism and programmatic skepticism about human
nature that Twain shows here kind of happened again in America in the
sixties. In a weird way, this is almost like a proto-Pynchon story. It’s
very thoughtful and logically consistent and it moves through a lot of
individual psyches with a strange philosophical knife, because it exposes
all the machinations of human hypocrisy. It’s like the *War and Peace* of
hypocrisy, this story. Time and time again, we have these characters trying
to figure out how they can lie and get this money without sacrificing their
self-image. Because the disease of Hadleyburg is that it wants to look good
on the outside. And that’s the torture of this place. Twain even suggests
that one of the reasons it’s so susceptible to corruption is because maybe
it hasn’t allowed itself to be a *little* corrupt.