Brain Snacks: Tasty Tidbits of Knowledge
Change of plans: when Mark Twain set out to write Pudd'nhead Wilson, he thought that the twins, Luigi and Angelo, would be the stars of the novel. (Source.)
Middle school was apparently something Twain wasn't looking forward to since he dropped out of school after the fifth grade. (Source.)
Pudd'nhead Wilson caused quite a stir on Wall Street when it was first published, as some people speculated that that Pudd'nhead's character was based on real-life governor of the New York Stock Exchange, Theodore Wilson. Some folks even sent out a petition to have the guy ousted! (Source.)
No light reading for Twain—he preferred reading about statistics over reading fiction. (Source.)
Twain's inspiration for the twins in Pudd'nhead Wilson were the Tocci brothers, a pair of conjoined twins fused at the rib cage whom Twain saw in an exhibit in Italy (one was a drinker and the other a teetotaler just like in the novel!) (Source.)