Pudd'nhead Wilson is a story of mistaken identities in 1890s Missouri. Roxy, a slave who is one-sixteenth black, is afraid that she and her infant son Chambers will be sold to a plantation where conditions are much harsher, so she switches Chambers with the master's son, Tom. The false Tom grows up spoiled and immoral; after Roxy blackmails him, he commits murder, and everything comes down to the fingerprints taken by a local lawyer when Tom and Chambers were babies. The novel examines the ideas of identity and irony.
"The reader knows from the beginning who committed the murder, and the story foreshadows how the crime will be solved. The circumstances of the denouement, however, possessed in its time great novelty, for fingerprinting had not then come into official use in crime detection in the United States. Even a man who fooled around with it as a hobby was thought to be a simpleton, a 'pudd'nhead'." (From Langston Hughes' introduction to the novel)
The story describes the racism of antebellum Missouri, even as to seemingly white people with minute traces of African ancestry, and the acceptance of that state of affairs by all involved, including to some extent the black population.
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