This is the only authoritative text of this late novel. It reproduces the manuscript which Mark Twain wrote last, and the only one he finished or called the "The Mysterious Stranger." Albert Bigelow Paine's edition of the same name has been shown to be a textual fraud.

"The Mark Twain Library is one of the glories of the University of California Press."—Los Angeles Times [Jonathan Kirsch, 11 September 1983]

"Handsome, readable and full of surprises . . . the American classics that come to us from the Mark Twain Library are simply superb."—Los Angeles Times [Jonathan Kirsch, 11 September 1983]

"The Mark Twain Project of the University of California Press is reuniting Samuel Clemens’s texts with the essential illustrations he commissioned for them, and the results are splendid: may the Twain never again be sundered!" Vanity Fair [Cathleen Medwick, vol. 46 (December 1983): 16]

"Each additional volume reaffirms our faith and celebration in this splendid series." Nineteenth-Century Fiction [vol. 39 (June 1984): 120-21]

"Any academic who assigns another text rather than one of the . . . volumes now available in the Mark Twain Library owes the profession an apology if it can be found." American Literature [vol. 56 (October 1984): 454] [the elided word is "five"—the review covered the five in print in Oct. 1984: 1. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; 2. No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger; 3. Tom Sawyer Abroad and Tom Sawyer, Detective; 4. The Prince and the Pauper; 5. A Connecticut Yankee.]

"One of the great scholarly enterprises of the century. . . . If you want to enjoy, and to understand fully, the genius of Mark Twain, the California editions are the only texts to have." London Telegraph [Michael Shelden]