Story: "The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg"

Mark Twain's story "The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg" investigates the basic character of the American town, finding that pride and vanity can combine to create a false sense of honesty which masks and rationalizes lies. Even when the citizenry trains and trains and trains for honesty, their habit of avoiding temptation utterly makes the virtue weak and eminently corruptible when temptation finally arises.

The story is long and I find it tedious in parts, but it exhibits a wonderful technique for expressing the private thoughts of men, of private conversations of husbands and wives, and how private thoughts and conversations link in towns to create common concerns -- the town becomes an "it" with its own rough identity. And Twain -- ever the newspaperman, as we should never forget -- understands what is fashionably called "publics" today, which is to say he understands that the identity of people in collectives like towns is based on what they read in the papers, or think of to put in the papers; it is the public image of a community and the image of the public image in the minds of the community members that come together in tandem to create a sense of town, and of moral evaluation, and so of moral conviction of the self. The most terrible temptation of town living, Twain seems to say, is that one begins to think not of what is right and wrong absolutely, but what can be justified or well-presented to the neighbors and the papers.