Mark Twain - The Adventures of Samuel L. Clemens

by Jerome Loving

  2. MT to Joseph H. Twichell, September 9 [1879] (Yale University Library), printed without date in Letters, 1: 338.

  3. MT to Bayard Taylor, December 14, 1878 (Cornell University Library); [Bayard Taylor], “American vs. English Criticism,” New York Tribune, April 12, 1876.

  4. N&J, 2: 308–9, 316

  5. N&J, 2: 324–26.

  6. N&J, 2: 294–95.

  7. MTB, 2: 646; N&J, 2: 339, 486.

  8. “Mr. Darwin’s Descent of Man had been in print five or six years, and the storm of indignation raised by it was still raging in pulpits and periodicals,” Twain wrote in “A Monument to Adam” in a July 1903 issue of Harper’s Weekly. “In tracing the genesis of the human race back to its sources, Mr. Darwin had left Adam out altogether. We had monkeys, and ‘missing links,’ and plenty of other kinds of ancestors, but no Adam. Jesting with Mr. [Thomas K.] Beecher and other friends in Elmira, I said there seemed to be a likelihood that the world would discard Adam and accept the monkey, and that in the course of time Adam’s very name would be forgotten in the earth; therefore this calamity ought to be averted; a monument would accomplish this, and Elmira ought not to waste this honorable opportunity to do Adam a favor and herself a credit.”

  9. MTCI, 22–27; MT to Daniel Slote, September 4, 1879 (photocopy in MTP, courtesy of Heritage Book Shop, April 27, 1994); “Unconscious Plagiarism,” in Mark Twain’s Speeches (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 56–58.

  31. ASSOCIATIONS NEW AND OLD

  1. Frederick Anderson and Hamlin Hill, “How Samuel Clemens Became Mark Twain’s Publisher,” Proof 2 (1972), 118–19.

  2. Carl J. Webber, The Rise and Fall of James R. Osgood (Waterville, ME: Colby College Press, 1959), 176–82.

  3. Charles L. Webster to MT, May 5, 1881 (MTP); MTMF, 247–50.

  4. Walt Whitman: The Correspondence, ed. Edwin Haviland Miller (New York: New York University Press, 1964), 3: 224; and Jerome Loving, Walt Whitman’s Champion: William Douglas O’Connor (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1978), 125n.

  5. Ed Folsom and Jerome Loving, “Mark Twain: ‘The Walt Whitman Controversy,’ ” Virginia Quarterly Review 83 (Spring 2007), 123–38.

  6. N&J, 2: 486, 510n; Edgar M. Branch, “ ‘The Babes in the Wood’: Artemus Ward’s ‘Double Health’ to Mark Twain,” Publications of the Modern Language Association 93 (October 1978), 972 n. 64; L, 5: 222–26n.

  32. RETURN TO THE RIVER AND THE LECTURE CIRCUIT

  1. N&J, 2: 527, 531, 533.

  2. N&J, 2: 547.

  3. See Horace E. Bixby, “How the Boy Became a Pilot and the Pilot a Humorist,” New Orleans Times-Democrat, May 7, 1882.

  4. Eric Sundquist, “Realism and Regionalism,” in Columbia Literary History of the United States, ed. Emory Elliott (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 514; James Kinney, “Race in the New South: Joel Chandler Harris’s ‘Free Joe and the Rest of the World,’ ” American Literary Realism 33, no. 3 (2001), 244. See also Guy A. Cardwell, Twins of Genius (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1953); and Arlin Turner, Mark Twain and George W. Cable: The Record of a Literary Friendship (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1960).

  5. LLMT, 212.

  6. Arlin Turner, “Notes on Mark Twain in New Orleans,” McNeese Review 6 (Spring 1954), 10–22.

  7. N&J, 2: 489–91.

  8. N&J, 2: 567–69.

  9. MT to James R. Osgood [June 11, 1882] (MTP; courtesy of Todd M. Axelrod); MTBus, 207.

  10. R. Kent Rasmussen, Mark Twain: A to Z (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 445; MTHL, 1: 435–36; N&J, 3: 19n.

  11. Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant, ed. E. B. Long (New York: Da Capo, 1982), 20. Another possibility for “G. G.” is George Griffin. As the Clemens butler, he was chief of all the other servants and in charge of household security. For example, he locked up the silverware every night to protect it from domestic pilfering. See Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, ed. Victor Fischer and Lin Salamo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 376.

  12. N&J, 3: 29n.

  13. N&J, 3: 60n.

  14. N&J, 3: 83.

  15. Arlin Turner, George W. Cable: A Biography (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1956), 160–93.

  16. Lang’s essay also appeared in The Critic 16 (July 25, 1891), 45–46, where he compared Huckleberry Finn to the Odyssey; see Roger Asselineau, The Literary Reputation of Mark Twain from 1910 to 1950 (Paris: Librairie Marcel Didier, 1954), 70.

  17. Lorch, 168; Turner, George W. Cable, 176.

  18. “Cable and Twain: The Author and the Humorist Arrive in the City Today,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, January 9, 1885 (in MTCI, 70–72).

  19. MT to Olivia Langdon Clemens, February 3 and 8, 1885 (MTP).

  33. MARK TWAIN AND THE PHUNNY PHELLOWS

  1. Walter Blair, Native American Humor (Chandler Publishing Company, 1960), 147n; MT to David Gray, June 10, 1880, quoted in Roughing It, ed. Harriet Elinor Smith and Edgar Marquess Branch (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 797.

  2. Blair, Native American Humor, 109.

  3. Walter Blair and Hamlin Hill, America’s Humor from Poor Richard to Doonesbury (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 263–64.

  4. Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill & Wang, 1982), 23.

  34. WEBSTER AND PAIGE

  1. Pamela A. Moffett to MT, July 10, 1887 (MTP), quoted in Charles H. Gold, Hatching Ruin, or Mark Twain’s Road to Bankruptcy (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003), 115.

  2. “Invented a Typesetting Machine: Joseph [sic] W. Paige, Who Has Been Sued for $950,000 for Breach of Promise,” Chicago Daily Tribune, June 11, 1892.

  3. MT to Orion Clemens, July 1, 1889, quoted in MTLP, 1; MTA, 1: 78.

  4. Kenneth Sanderson, “The Books of Charles L. Webster & Co.,” unpublished paper dated August 16, 1979 (MTP). Interestingly, in the appendix to The American Claimant, one of the later books included in the Webster & Company list, Twain alluded to O’Connor’s description of weather in the posthumously published “The Brazen Android,” Atlantic Monthly 62 (April 1891), 433–54.

  5. Albert Bigelow Paine’s comments in the margin of the typescript for Twain’s autobiographical dictation for May 29, 1906 (MTP), quoted in Gold, Hatching Ruin, 64.

  6. N&J, 3: 201n.

  7. Pamela A. Moffett to Samuel E. Moffett, April 17, 1881 (MTP), quoted in Gold, Hatching Ruin, 80; MT to Charles L. Webster, July 27, 1885 (Vassar College Library).

  8. Justin Kaplan, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1966), 282.

  9. N&J, 3: 288.

  10. N&J, 3: 288–89, 202n, 218n; MTLP, 195–96, 255n, 269n. For Higbie, see also chapter 10, note 14.

  11. Fred A. Hall to MT, September 17, 1888, quoted in N&J, 3: 304.

  12. Gold, Hatching Ruin, 131; MT to Pamela Ann Moffett, July 1, 1889 (MTP).

  13. MT to Pamela Ann Moffett, June 7, 1897, quoted in Gold, Hatching Ruin, 154.

  14. MTHHR, 66.

  15. MT to Orion Clemens, February 25, 1891 (MTP).

  35. A ROMANCE OF THE WHITE CONSCIENCE

  1. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, ed. Victor Fischer and Lin Salamo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 445, 743.

  2. Along this line, see Louis J. Budd, “A ‘Nobler Roman Aspect’ of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” in One Hundred Years of Huckleberry Finn: The Boy, His Book, and American Culture, ed. Robert Sattlemeyer and J. Donald Crowley (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1985), 26–40.

  3. Samuel E. Moffett, “Mark Twain, Humorist, Man of Letters and Champion of the Right,” The Pilgrim (Battle Creek, MI), September 1903, pp. 6–8; Clara L. Clemens to Samuel E. Moffett [October–December 1902] (MTP).

  4. N&J, 3: 538, 343.

  5. MTL, 2: 666.

  6. “I was named Langhorne from a valued friend of my father, but he was not a relative, but a comrade of my father’s youth in Virginia. I merely served by my name
as a remembrance of that loved and lost comradeship of a vanished day” (MT to W. H. Langhorne, August 1–17, 1892 [MTP], published in the London Times, May 5, 1910).

  7. N&J, 3: 383n, 389n. Arnold’s essay “Civilisation in the United States” appeared in the April number of Nineteenth Century for 1888 and was reprinted in the New York Evening Post of April 9, 1888. To his credit, Arnold also described Grant as “a man of sterling good-sense as well as of the firmest resolution; a man withal, humane, simple, modest; . . . never boastful where he himself was concerned, and where his nation was concerned seldom boastful.”

  8. MT to Francis E. Bliss, August 26, September 8, 1901 (University of Texas Library); “Only a Nigger,” in Mark Twain at the Buffalo Express, ed. Joseph B. McCullough and Janice McIntire-Strasburg (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2000), 22–23.

  9. Tom Quirk, Mark Twain and Human Nature (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2007), 157.

  10. R. Kent Rasmussen, Mark Twain: A to Z (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 280.

  36. PUBLISHING GRANT

  1. MTE, 170, 175.

  2. William S. McFeely, Grant: A Biography (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), 490, 492.

  3. Who Is Mark Twain? ed. Robert H. Hirst (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 27.

  4. MT to Olivia Susan (Susy) Clemens, November 23, 1884 (MTP).

  5. MTE, 170–74.

  6. MTE, 175–78; MTA, 1: 37.

  7. MTA, 1: 48.

  8. MTA, 1: 49–51.

  9. MTA, 1: 55–56; MT to Boston Herald, July 6, 1885 (MTP).

  10. MT to Karl Gerhardt, July 6, 1885 (Yale University Library); MT to Edward H. House, July 21, 1885 (University of Virginia Library).

  11. Who Is Mark Twain? 27–28

  12. Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant, ed. E. B. Long (Cleveland: World Publishing Company, 1952), vii; Who Is Mark Twain? 27.

  13. The Prince and the Pauper reissues were actually made up of sheets from the original publication by James R. Osgood and Company, reissued with new inserted title pages under the imprint of Charles L. Webster & Company.

  14. The reprint of Life on the Mississippi was a reissue of Osgood sheets with a new Webster & Company title page.

  37. BROODING IN KING ARTHUR’S COURT

  1. Quoted in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, ed. Bernard Stein, with an introduction by Henry Nash Smith (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 27.

  2. James M. Cox, “ ‘A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court’: The Machinery of Self-Preservation,” Yale Review 50 (1960), 89–102. See also James M. Cox, Mark Twain: The Fate of Humor (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966), 207.

  3. MTL, 1: 447–48; MT to Olivia Susan Clemens, February 8, 1885 (University of Virginia Library); MTMF, 257–58; Howard G. Baetzhold, “ ‘The Autobiography of Sir Robert Smith of Camelot’: Mark Twain’s Original Plan for A Connecticut Yankee,” American Literature 32 (January 1961), 456–61.

  4. N&J, 3: 398, 401, 293; Howard G. Baetzhold, Mark Twain and John Bull: The British Connection (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970), 107–13.

  5. Baetzhold, Mark Twain and John Bull, 135.

  6. Susan Goodman and Carl Dawson, William Dean Howells: A Writer’s Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 280–81.

  7. Paul J. Carter, Jr., “Mark Twain and the American Labor Movement,” New England Quarterly 30 (September 1957), 383–88.

  38. PROGRESS AND POVERTY

  1. Mark Twain, The American Claimant (New York: Charles L. Webster & Co., 1892), 97. Clemens actually quoted from his own speech, “The American Press,” written in 1888 for the Society of the Army of the Cumberland but never delivered (MTP).

  2. MTHL, 2: 595.

  3. MT to Orion Clemens, December 8, 1887 (Vassar College Library). See also Alan Gribben, “Autobiography as Property: Mark Twain and His Legend,” in The Mythologizing of Mark Twain, ed. Sara de Saussure Davis and Philip D. Beidler (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1984), 39–55.

  4. Camden’s Compliment to Walt Whitman, ed. Horace Traubel (Philadelphia: David McKay, 1889), 64–65 (letter dated May 24, 1889, in Beinecke Library, Yale University).

  5. MTHL, 2: 628n.

  6. MT to Timothy Dwight, letter published in the Hartford Courant, June 29, 1888.

  7. MT to Charles H. Clark, July 2, 1888 (MTP).

  8. MT to Orion Clemens, July 2, 1888; MT to Olivia Lewis Langdon, December 1, 1888 (MTP).

  9. On February 2, 1890, he told Daniel Frohman in a letter he may not have mailed: “Do not make any foreign contracts. I cannot consent to have this amazing burlesque played in England . . . if you had allowed me to see the manuscript in time, this stuff would not have gone on the stage” (St. John’s Seminary, Camarillo, CA).

  10. Takashima Mariko, “Not Twain, But Twichell: The Hartford Support System of Edward House’s Japanese Students,” Mark Twain Studies 2 (October 2006), 142–57; MT to Dean Sage, February 5, 1890 (James S. Copley Library, La Jolla, California). See also MT to Edward H. House, March 19, 1889 (University of Virginia Library); and Paul Fatout, “Mark Twain, Litigant,” American Literature, 31 (March 1959), 30–45.

  11. MT to Hamlin Garland, March 23, 1889 (University of Southern California Library); MT to Pamela A. Moffett, July 1, 1889 (MTP).

  12. MT to Olivia Susan Clemens, July 16, 1889 (MTP); Andrew Hoffman, Inventing Mark Twain: The Lives of Samuel Langhorne Clemens (New York: William Morrow, 1997), 367; Papa: An Intimate Biography of Mark Twain by Susy Clemens, ed. Charles Neider (New York: Doubleday, 1985), 15; Karen Lystra, Dangerous Intimacy: The Untold Story of Mark Twain’s Final Years (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 16.

  13. Olivia L. Clemens and MT to Georgina Sullivan Jones, January 23–25, 1891 (MTP); Susy and Mark Twain, ed. Edith Colgate Salsbury (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 283.

  14. Papa, 131; Susy and Mark Twain, 286–88.

  15. MTMF, 265–66; Susy and Mark Twain, 284.

  39. EUROPE ON ONLY DOLLARS A DAY

  1. For texts of the Sun essays as they were syndicated in the Chicago Tribune, see Barbara Schmidt’s website at www.twainquotes.com/newspapercollections.html.

  2. MT to Olivia L. Clemens, September 28, 1891 (transcribed from manuscript, courtesy of Christie’s, MTP).

  3. MT to Orion Clemens, June 28, 1892 (MTP).

  4. Clara Clemens, My Father, Mark Twain (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1931), 64.

  5. MT to Charles J. Langdon, August 7, 1892 (MTP).

  6. MTLP, 318–19.

  7. LLMT, 265; MT to Susan L. Crane, September 18, 1892 (MTP).

  8. MT to Susan L. Crane, September 30, 1892 (MTP); Olivia Susan Clemens to Louise Brownell [October 14, 1892] (Hamilton College Library); MT to Clara L. Clemens, November 10, 1892 (MTP).

  9. MTLP, 321; MT to Chatto and Windus, November 10, 1892 (Albert A. and Henry W. S. Berg Collection, New York Public Library); MT to Chatto and Windus, October 13, 1892 (University of Louisville Library); MT to Frederick J. Hall, December 2, 1892 (MTP); MTLP, 328.

  10. MT to unidentified, June 25, 1895 (University of Texas Library).

  11. MTLP, 328, 337.

  12. MTLP, 344, 354–55, 359; Ron Powers, Mark Twain: A Life (New York: Free Press, 2005), 543.

  13. J. Henry Harper, I Remember (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1934), 134–35.

  40. A DREAM SOLD DOWN THE RIVER

  1. See Eric J. Sundquist, “Mark Twain and Homer Plessy,” in Mark Twain: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Eric J. Sundquist (Edgewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1994), 169–83.

  2. Theodore Dreiser, “Nigger Jeff,” Ainslee’s 8 (November 1901), 366–66; Arthur Henry, Nicholas Blood, Candidate (New York: Oliver Dodd, 1890), 32.

  3. MTLP, 359.

  4. Mark Twain, Pudd’nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins, ed. Sidney E. Berger (New York: W. W. Norton, 1980), 9.

  5. Pudd’nhead Wilson, 70, 40, 39, 71.

  6. Pudd’nhead Wilson, 124.

  7. Pudd
’nhead Wilson, 114, 8. For Hawthorne, see Jerome Loving, Lost in the Customhouse: Authorship in the American Renaissance (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1993), 19–34.

  8. Pudd’nhead Wilson, 11, 114.

  41. FAMILY MATTERS

  1. MTMF, 268–70; 336; MT to Olivia L. Clemens, April 4, 1893 (MTP); Olivia Susan Clemens to Louise Brownell [April 1893] (Hamilton College Library).

  2. Olivia Susan Clemens to Louise Brownell [March 5, 1893, March 1893] (Hamilton College Library).

  3. MT to Clara L. Clemens, January 21, 1893 (MTP); Olivia Susan Clemens to Louise Brownell [April 3, 1893] (Hamilton College Library); “In Defense of Harriet Shelley,” in How to Tell a Story and Other Essays (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 15.

  4. MT to Susan L. Crane, March 19, 1893 (Mark Twain House, Hartford, CT).

  5. MT to Olivia L. Clemens, April 4, 1893 (MTP); MTE, 312.

  6. MT to Susan L. Crane, April 23, 1893 (MTP); Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City (New York: Random House, 2003).

  7. MT to Orion Clemens, April 26, 1893; MT to Pamela A. Moffett, April 26, 1893 (MTP); MTLP, 343.

  8. MT to Susan L. Crane, August 20, 1893 (MTP); Olivia Susan Clemens to Louise Brownell [September 3 and November 8, 1893] (Hamilton College Library).

  9. LLMT, 267–68; MTHL, 2: 653.

  42. A FRIEND AT STANDARD OIL

  1. Justin Kaplan, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1966), 383–85, 321.

  2. MT to Olivia L. Clemens, October 18, 1893 (transcribed from manuscript, courtesy of Christie’s, New York [MTP]); LLMT, 269–70.

  3. MTHHR, 11; LLMT, 280.

  4. LLMT, 287.