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He began to form a plan at once, saying to himself "That is the thing to do I will corrupt the town." Six months later he went to Hadleyburg, and arrived in a buggy at the house of the old cashier of the bank about ten at night. He got a sack out of the buggy, shouldered it, and staggered with it through the cottage yard, and knocked at the door.
and finishing up with cheers and a tiger for "Hadleyburg purity and our eighteen immortal representatives of it." Then Wingate, the saddler, got up and proposed cheers "for the cleanest man in town, the one solitary important citizen in it who didn't try to steal that money Edward Richards."
Mark Twain wrote much and well during this period, in spite of his social life. His article "Concerning the Jews" was written that first winter in Vienna a fine piece of special pleading; also the greatest of his short stories one of the greatest of all short stories "The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg."
Mark Twain in The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg had more recently put it bitterly on record that villages which prided themselves upon their simple virtues might from lack of temptation have become a hospitable soil for meanness and falsehood, merely waiting for the proper seed.
I am grateful to America for what I have received at her hands during my long stay under her flag; and to one of her citizens a citizen of Hadleyburg I am especially grateful for a great kindness done me a year or two ago. Two great kindnesses in fact. I will explain. I was a gambler. I say I WAS. I was a ruined gambler. I arrived in this village at night, hungry and without a penny.
'Tom Sawyer', only little inferior to its pendent story, which might well be regarded as the supreme American morality play of youth, 'Everyboy'; 'The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg', an ironic fable of such originality and dexterous creation that it has no satisfactory parallel in literature; the first half of 'Life on the Mississippi' and all of 'Roughing It', for their reflections of the sociological phases of a civilization now vanished forever.
If demonstration were needed that Mark Twain is sealed of the tribe of moralists, that is amply supplied by that masterpiece, that triumph of invention, construction, and originality, 'The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg'. Here is a pure morality, daring in the extreme and incredibly original in a world perpetually reiterating a saying already thousands of years old, to the effect that there is nothing new under the sun.
The greatest ironic achievements of Mark Twain, in brief compass, are the two stories: 'The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg' and 'Was it Heaven or Hell'? They reveal the power and subtlety of his art as an ironic humorist or shall we rather say, ironic wit?
In the end Halliday said to himself, "Anyway it roots up that there's nineteen Hadleyburg families temporarily in heaven: I don't know how it happened; I only know Providence is off duty to-day." An architect and builder from the next State had lately ventured to set up a small business in this unpromising village, and his sign had now been hanging out a week.
'The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg', viewed from any standpoint, is a masterpiece; but its significance lies, not in the locality of its setting, but in the universality of its moral. In a word, it was the East which broadened and universalized the spirit of Mark Twain. We shall see, later on, that it steadily fostered in him a spirit of true nationalism and hardy democracy.
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