• By the turn of the century, with the publication of The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg (1900), “To the Person Sitting in Darkness” (1901), and “The Mysterious Stranger” (1916), his obsessive vision of man as greedy numbskull笨蛋, oafish疵呆 的、畸形的, hypocritical, cruel and predatory, was wholly ahis wife and two daughters left him embittered and lonely. • The failure of his publishing firm and a series of bad financial investments brought him humiliation and bankruptcy, leading him to travel throughout the world on a lecture series to pay off his debts, a long and exhausting experience he recorded with barely disguised weariness in Following the Equator (1897).
• By the time he came to write A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), with its angry satire on royalty, religion, and the chivalric ideals of Arthurian England, his work had become more serious and critical.