Return to Bibliography of Willa Cather's Readings
Bibliography: Pudd'nhead Wilson (play) by Mayo, Frank
- Title
- Pudd'nhead Wilson (play)
- Author
- Mayo, Frank
- Date
- Genre
- drama
- Note Source
- Leader 2/9/1897
- Note Relating to Cather
- On Frank Mayo's adaptation for the stage of Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson: "Decidedly there are very few American plays as clever as Pudd'nhead Wilson.... Mr. Mayo was not mistaken when he thought he saw great dramatic possibilities in Mark Twain's novel. With the exception of the necessary omission of a large part of Pudd'nhead's Calendar, the play is quite as good as the novel, and that is putting it pretty strongly, for very few of the best plays are really as good as even the poor novels. Of course the pith and heart of the play is the race question, the struggle between the Negro blood and the white, the demonstration that circumstances and environment could not make a slave a gentleman nor a gentleman a slave. As Roxy says in the last act when her own son is crouching at her feet, 'Taint no use nohow, you ain't no 'count. I suppose it's the nigger in you.'"
