The Mysterious Stranger is the final novel attempted by the American author Mark Twain. He worked on it periodically from 1897 through 1908. The body of work is a serious social commentary by Twain addressing his ideas of the Moral Sense and the "damned human race". It is a novel about the deeply religious residents of a small village in Austria during the late sixteenth century and what happened to several of them when a strange man began to visit their insulated homeland.