Harvard has produced its share of leaders of governments, captains of industry, innovators artistic and entrepreneurial, and pillars of the academy and education. Still, any community numbering in the hundreds of thousands includes at least a few baser characters. Christopher Cadbury—the pen name of a Class of 1961 graduate—catalogued many miscreants for his 2024 collection, Harvard Scoundrels.
But no American writer has had a better take on bounders, charlatans, and mountebanks than Mark Twain. So Primus, Kindle in hand during a recent long trip, took particular pleasure in finding the Great Author in full flood, as it were, unloading on an especially ripe (allegedly) Cantabrigian reprobate in Life on the Mississippi, Twain’s 1883 memoir of his time as a steamboat captain.
Chapter 52 of the book, like any Twain tale, is many-layered like an onion. First, Twain introduces a bad guy, Charles Williams, a “graduate of Harvard College [who] came of good New England stock.” The son of a clergyman, Williams now resides in a “certain State prison” (not otherwise specified) for having robbed a homeowner of $8,000 in bonds at gunpoint.
Twain then recounts a remarkable, redemptive letter written to Williams by a fellow inmate named Jack Hunt, an “ex-thief and ex-vagabond of the lowest origin and basest rearing.” Apparently, Hunt came under the influence of Williams, by then “an earnest Christian,” in the slammer.
The letter details, in the most moving terms, Hunt’s reclamation, once freed. He heroically saved two children in a runaway carriage, found employment, discovered thrift, and turned to God (to whom Williams had prayed on Hunt’s behalf). He even conducted Sunday school classes. This letter moved pastors and their congregations to tears across the land and found its way to Twain, who confessed “seldom [having] been so deeply stirred by any piece of writing.”
Indeed, Twain is about to share Hunt’s story with the world in a magazine article when a third layer unfurls: he discovers through correspondence and his own vetting of the text that the letter was “the confoundedest, brazenest, ingeniousest piece of fraud and humbuggery that was ever concocted to fool poor confiding mortals with!” In fact, Williams had written the missive himself and smuggled it into hands sympathetic to his jailhouse conversion. (“A pure swindle,” Twain wrote.) Among the details that aroused Twain’s suspicion: a line at the end of the letter, referencing Williams’s tuberculosis—a sign that the felon was playing on public sympathy to get himself pardoned.
Twain’s account leaves a mystery: who was “Williams” in real life—and did he actually have a Harvard degree? Deep dives into Twain’s notebooks and autobiography led nowhere. Inquiries to a prominent Twain scholar, Stanford professor Shelley Jane Fishkin, and to Harvard University Archives yielded nothing. (Readers inclined to historical detective work are encouraged to weigh in.)
This being 2026, Primus invoked the AI sleuthing skills of a Harvard Magazine colleague. Generative AI, itself known for telling tall tales on occasion, hallucinated a few swindlers of that era who impersonated refined gentlemen and plied their trade even from behind bars, writing to public figures and clergymen in search of support (or money). Several other criminals unearthed by AI were real, but none had a known Harvard degree.
Whoever “Williams” really was, that Harvard degree appears to the modern reader as a bit of prescience—or anticipatory pique—by Twain, who received an honorary master’s from Yale in 1888 (five years after Life on the Mississippi was published), followed by a doctor of humane letters degree during Yale’s bicentennial year, in 1901. Twain collected another honorary doctorate from Oxford (note: not Cambridge) in 1907 and was similarly honored by Johns Hopkins—but never by this University.
All of which makes one reflect on just how long it has been a thing to buff up one’s bona fides by awarding oneself a Crimson credential—or to drag Harvard’s name down into the (Mississippi) mud. That last tactic, alas, seems common in the far less literary American public discourse of today.
