Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction…

The line is one of two maxims Mark Twain placed at the head of chapter 15 of Following the Equator, both signed “Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar”. The other plays on the same saying: truth is stranger than fiction “to some people, but I am measurably familiar with it.” The chapter then proves the point. On an excursion in New South Wales, Twain reaches Wagga-Wagga, where the Tichborne Claimant had kept a butcher’s shop before the whole world wondered whether he was the lost heir Sir Roger Tichborne or Arthur Orton, “the mislaid roustabout of Wapping”. He was eventually convicted of perjury in London, in 1874.

Following the Equator, published in 1897, tells of the lecture tour around the world that Twain made in 1895 and 1896 to pay off his debts after the failure of his publishing house.

“Truth is stranger than fiction” was already a saying; Byron used it in Don Juan. Twain’s addition explains it: a novelist must stay believable, while reality owes nobody plausibility.

Following the Equator, Chapter 15, epigraph from Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar, 1897

Checked word for word in the work itself.

Read the passage in the work