SOURCE: "The Genesis of The Mysterious Stranger" in Mark Twain Quarterly 7, Nos. 3 and 4, Spring/Summer, 1947, pp. 15-19.

In the following essay, Laverty traces the beginnings of The Mysterious Stranger to, among other things, a short tale by Jane Taylor.

A scholar may consider a piece of writing as an organic entity—an entity that is conceived when the fertilizing idea strikes the nourishing mind of the author. The embryonic work thereafter is fed from the vast storehouse of mental and emotional experiences of the author. Thus the brainchild grows and is born. If Mark Twain's The Mysterious Stranger be considered as such an organic creation, the fertilizing idea may well have been a short "moral" tale written by Jane Taylor, an English writer of religious and didactic pieces, and reprinted in more than one edition of the famed McGuffey Readers under the title "The Mysterious Stranger"—Mark Twain's...