Adam was but human—this explains it all. He did not want the apple for the apple’s sake, he wanted it only because it was forbidden.

Every chapter of the novel opens with one or two entries from Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar, the ‘whimsical almanac’ with ‘a little dab of ostensible philosophy, usually in ironical form’ that David Wilson keeps for his own amusement; when Judge Driscoll reads some of them to the leading citizens of Dawson’s Landing, they take them ‘in the solidest earnest’ as proof that Wilson is a fool (chapter V). It heads a chapter about temptation. Small sums keep disappearing from Percy Driscoll’s house; the narrator observes that his enslaved servants, who ‘had an unfair show in the battle of life’, held it no sin to take small things from their masters. When money is missing again, Driscoll threatens to sell all four of them ‘down the river’ unless the thief confesses. Roxy, fresh from a revival, has for once left the money alone; the other three confess, and Driscoll sells them locally instead, sure he has done a noble thing.

People want what they are told they may not have; the ban, not the thing, is the attraction. Had God forbidden the serpent, Adam would have eaten that.

The chapter this heads uses the racial slur of its time, in the narration and in the servants’ speech, a few paragraphs after the maxim.

• ShortenedAdam did not want the apple for the apple’s sake; he wanted it because it was forbidden. Drops the punchline about the serpent.

• Mark Twain, 1907: An autobiographical chapter of 1906-07 says of the swimming-pools near his uncle’s farm that they ‘were forbidden to us and therefore much frequented by us. For we were little Christian children, and had early been taught the value of forbidden fruit.’

• Wheresoever she was, there was Eden.
• Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.
• When angry, count four; when very angry, swear.
• cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.
• In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then He made School Boards.

• en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mark_Twain

Mark Twain, The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894), Chapter II (“Driscoll Spares His Slaves”), epigraph from Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar. Spoken by Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar. Checked at Quotogeny, https://quotogeny.com/q/adam-wanted-the-apple-because-it-was-forbidden/ (31 October 2026).

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