Long-Lost Twain Resurfaces in Brazil

Mark Twain's A Murder, a Mystery, and a Marriage (Norton, 2001) might not ring a bell, but Brazil's Ministry of Education recently made the long-lost novelette required reading for every fourth grader.

Why would Brazil choose one of Twain's least-known works? Because the author is "one of the pillars of modern literature [and] his work appeals to readers of all ages," says Alessandra Blocker, editor of foreign acquisitions at Objectiva, the book's Brazilian publisher.

Twain's 80-page novelette was one of a collection of titles chosen for a program called Literature at Home. Its mission is to introduce books to Brazilian children, who will in turn share them with their parents, siblings, and other family members. About 12.2 million fourth graders in Brazil's 186,000 public schools will start receiving a five-book collection by the end of April, Blocker says.

Twain wrote the story in 1876, after the success of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer but before the completion of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn . The author had planned to launch a competition in the Atlantic Monthly , inviting magazine readers to finish the story. But the competition never took place, and Twain's story, complete with its own ending, went unpublished for more than 125 years. The manuscript had been housed at the University of Texas, Austin, before the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library in Buffalo, NY, obtained the rights to publish the manuscript and presented it to the American publisher Norton, which released the book in September, says Norton's Louise Brockett.