The final version of the story NO. 44, THE MYSTERIOUS STRANGER was released in a popular edition by University of California Press in 1982.

The name No. 44 for young Satan was one Twain had first used in the unfinished “Schoolhouse Hill” version:

“My wonderful scholar, tell me your name.” The school crowded forward in a body to devour the stranger at close quarters with their envying eyes; all except Bascom, who remained apart and sulked. “Quarante-quatre, sir. Forty-four.” “Why–why–that is only a number, you know, not a name.”

In his explanatory notes for the book, editor William Gibson conceded that Twain’s number name was challenging and “it ought to mean something.” But what? Over the past decades, several noted Mark Twain scholars have presented their theories as to what may have been the inspiration or meaning of Twain’s number 44.

HENRY B. WONHAM’S THEORY, 2008
Minstrel Imagery

In his article “Mark Twain’s Last Cakewalk: Racialized Performance in No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger,” in American Literary Realism, Spring 2008, pp. 262-271, Henry Wonham commented on the multiple identities represented by No. 44. “44 punctuates the novel with appearances as a break-dancer, a cakewalker, and a minstrel type” and thereby “upsets our own assumptions about the simple differentiability of an essential self from its manifold representations … the original self and its burlesque representation have become entangled, conjoined.”

DAVID F. NOLAN’S THEORY, 2010
The Gaussian Bell Curve Distribution

David F. Nolan, an alumni of Massachusetts Institute of Technology writes that in some cultures, calling a person “number 44” is an insult, based on the belief that one person in 44 falls outside the norm. This corresponds to the fact that in a normal Gaussian (bell curve) distribution, 1/44 of a population falls outside the two-sigma point on the curve. The Gaussian theory of distribution was developed by Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777 – 1855), a German mathematician who applied it to theories of astronomy, a field in which Mark Twain was deelply interested. Nolan writes, “I first heard the phrase ‘you number 44’ in my student days at MIT; I don’t think it referred to Twain’s story in any way.”

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