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This collection brings together for the first time more than 360 of Mark Twain's short works written between 1851, the year of his first extant sketch, and 1871, when he renounced his ties with the Buffalo Express and the Galaxy, resolving to “write but little for periodicals hereafter.”1 In October 1871 Clemens and his family moved to Hartford, where they would live until 1891. No longer a journalist, he was about to complete his second full-length book, Roughing It. The literary apprenticeship that he had begun twenty years before in the print shops of Hannibal, and pursued in the newspaper offices of Virginia City, San Francisco, and Buffalo, had at last come to a close.

The selections included in these volumes represent a generous sampling from Mark Twain's most imaginative journalism, a few set speeches, a few poems, and hundreds of tales and sketches recovered from more than fifty newspapers and journals, as well as two dozen unpublished items of various description—the main body of what can now be found of his early literary and subliterary work, though by no means everything written during those twenty years of experimentation. The selections are ordered chronologically and therefore provide a nearly continuous record of the author's literary activity from his earliest juvenilia up through the mature work that he published in the Galaxy, the Buffalo Express, and many other journals.

It is part of the plan for The Works of Mark Twain to reprint the author's short works in five distinct collections. The editors of these collections have cooperated to assign each piece to an appropriate category: (1) religious and philosophical works; (2) social and political commentary; (3) literary, theatrical, and art criticism; (4) travel writings; and (5) tales and sketches, broadly defined to include some [begin page 2] speeches and poems as well. The editors recognize that a number of selections might, with reason, be assigned to more than one category. But their consistent aim has been to present the short works in a manner that would effectively highlight their closest kinship with each other and record the author's literary development along generally recognized lines of interest. Thus, the series of American travel letters (1866–1868) will be kept intact, even though these letters contain many items that might legitimately be called tales or sketches. On the other hand, several sketches that contain at least some political or social commentary have been incorporated in the present collection. In every case the consensus of the collection editors, the series editor, and the editorial board has been followed. And only one exception has been made to the overall plan just outlined: some twenty sketches originally assigned to one or another of the first four categories have been included here because they complete the roster of sketches that Mark Twain revised and reprinted between 1867 and 1875, when he published Sketches, New and Old.

It is perhaps needless to say that the terms “tale” and “sketch” are not precise. The author himself used “sketch” loosely, at times to signify all of his miscellaneous short writings (including some speeches and poems), and at others to indicate what we would call a “tale,” as when he described “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog” (no. 119) as a “villainous backwoods sketch.”2 The collection includes that one, and several other genuine tales, or imaginative narratives: “Ghost Life on the Mississippi” (no. 27), “Cannibalism in the Cars” (no. 232), and “Journalism in Tennessee” (no. 252) to name only the most ambitious. The great preponderance of short items, however, are sketches—and these range from ambitious magazine articles several thousand words long to short, hundred-word trifles tossed off by the newspaperman during a working day. The sketches include comic letters to the editor, hoaxes, exaggerated accounts of the author's personal activities, burlesques of many kinds, comic or satirical feuds with fellow journalists, ingeniously contrived self-advertisements, commentary in a light and personal vein, descriptive [begin page 3] reporting, reminiscences of past pleasures and adventures, and so on—but neither this nor any other list can easily be exhaustive. Sketches have been extracted from all kinds of sources, and we have occasionally isolated them from mundane material (such as lists and routine news) without any literary interest. No effort has been spared to locate the first printing (or manuscript) of every item. It is of course too much to hope that nothing remains to be found, but we have fully explored every resource available to us.

Our purpose throughout has been to recover and preserve this largely uncollected work: with few exceptions, every item is reprinted as the author first composed and published it, whether or not he later revised or dismissed it. In fact Mark Twain revised about one-third of the items—sometimes slightly, sometimes elaborately and repeatedly—and the story of revision and reprinting is fully told in the textual introduction; all known details of authorial revision are recorded in the textual apparatus.3

Historical annotation is supplied in two forms. Headnotes to each item discuss problems of authenticity; circumstances of composition and publication; dating; and real persons, places, and events mentioned in the sketch. Additional historical data are given in the explanatory notes section at the back of each volume. These notes contain information of more detailed and usually less essential character: identification of literary allusions, persons, places, and events not covered in the headnote. Every effort has been made to explain obscurities, but the absence of any note is allowed to stand for our failure to find an explanation. Literary allusions are identified even when they are well known, in the hope that the information will contribute to our knowledge of Clemens' literary background. In general, only first references have been annotated; the index at the back of each volume should be consulted for later references or for the first, annotated one.

Items are arranged chronologically by their date of publication, when this closely followed composition, or by the date of composition, when the text was either unpublished or published posthumously. The date appears below the title in the headnote. Since all [begin page 4] items are numbered sequentially throughout the collection, the numbering sequence corresponds to the sequence of composition, with the following exceptions:

(1) Closely related sketches have occasionally been grouped together. These groups are organized chronologically within themselves, but they usually interrupt the overall sequence of items. For instance, the last sketch in the group about the San Francisco earthquake (nos. 120–123) did not appear until November 1865, yet it is followed in this collection by a sketch that was published in October 1865—a sketch that resumes the main sequence where the group about the earthquake interrupted it. The headnote numbers of all items within a group of this kind are preceded by a symbol (§) to warn the reader that he may be temporarily outside the main chronological sequence of the collection.

(2) Some sketches were published as much as a month after their date of composition, as in the case of pieces sent from San Francisco to New York for publication, and the sequence of their printing here may therefore conflict with the order in which they were written.

(3) When the date of a sketch remains uncertain, we have conjectured inclusive dates for it—for example, 17–22 February 1863, March–April 1863, or simply June 1868. Items with such dates appear in the sequence at the earliest possible point. Thus a sketch known to have been published on 19 February 1863 is made to follow one that is conjecturally dated February 17–22, even though a more precise knowledge might reverse their order.

(4) Sketches published in monthly journals are placed in the chronology at the beginning of the month on the issue, because actual publication invariably preceded the first day of the month. For example, the May Galaxy always appeared sometime in late April; sketches published in that issue may therefore actually predate work that was published after the magazine appeared in April.

Most of the items in this collection pose no problem of authorship: they were signed or appeared under known conditions of Clemens' journalistic employment. When the evidence for his authorship is less certain, the procedure for establishing it is always discussed in the headnote. In general, we have required two independent pieces of objective evidence for a positive attribution, and in no case have stylistic traits—however persuasive or characteristic—sufficed by [begin page 5] themselves. In fact, the body of the collection excludes many imaginative pieces that we and other scholars have attributed to Clemens, but that lack such corroboration of their authenticity. Appendixes in each of the volumes therefore reprint attributed items that in our opinion deserve special consideration by anyone interested in establishing the full canon of Clemens' works.

The narrative that follows here recounts the known history of the circumstances of composition and first publication for these 365 short works, including the conditions of Clemens' employment and the growth of his reputation. The sketches are divided into four sections: (1) Hannibal and the River: 1851–1861; (2) Nevada Territory: 1862–1864; (3) California: 1864–1866; and (4) The Midwest and East Coast: 1866–1871. The narrative takes up each section in turn and concludes with a brief characterization of Mark Twain's work and overall literary development during this twenty-year period.

1. Hannibal and the River: 1851–1861. Ten years elapsed between the publication of “A Gallant Fireman” (no. 1), which Clemens composed in Hannibal when he was fifteen years old, and “Ghost Life on the Mississippi” (no. 27), written early in 1861 toward the end of his career as a pilot. These twenty-seven selections comprise a motley group of works: the author's juvenilia in Hannibal newspapers, articles from a few eastern journals, the river columns of New Orleans and St. Louis newspapers, and a few unpublished manuscripts preserved by his contemporaries, including his sister, Pamela. They provide some insight into the author's earliest command of his native talent, but they do not suggest an unwavering interest in literature or in publication. For well over a decade Clemens published only sporadically, as opportunity—or an especially appealing occasion—presented itself.

Clemens was probably introduced to newspaper work in the office of Henry La Cossitt's Hannibal Gazette during the fall of 1847 (several months after the death of his father), where he worked as printer's devil and jack-of-all-trades. During the next five years he served first as an apprentice on Joseph P. Ament's Missouri Courier and then, probably in January 1851, joined his brother Orion Clemens' Hannibal Western Union (later the Journal). It was in the Western Union that he published “A Gallant Fireman,” a piece that was in all probabil- [begin page 6] ity produced by the young compositor while he stood at his case setting it into type. The piece epitomizes the close connection between Clemens' training as a printer and his impulse to write. Indeed, most of the juvenilia reprinted here were stimulated by his early experience on a country newspaper.

Clemens' newspaper work had a more general influence on him as well. In his role as amateur reporter and subeditor under Orion he learned the rudiments of journalism—the value of using local names for concrete interest, for example, a sound principle that he later applied with great originality. He was exposed—through the institution of the newspaper exchange—to a wide variety of writing, including humor, fiction, short essays, local doggerel, sentimental poems, instructive commentary, letters from other towns and cities, and even correspondence from distant points like the Sandwich Islands and the Holy Land. Orion reprinted this kind of newspaper work, and we may be sure that Clemens helped search for appropriate material in magazines like the recently founded San Francisco Golden Era and the long-established Boston Carpet-Bag. Eventually, of course, Mark Twain would try his hand at all of these forms.

Certainly the idea of publishing something of his own in such journals occurred rather early. By May 1852 Clemens had succeeded in placing two brief items in the eastern press: “The Dandy Frightening the Squatter” (no. 2) in the Boston Carpet-Bag, and “Hannibal, Missouri” (no. 3) in the Philadelphia American Courier. These two sketches appeared within a week of each other, and are almost certainly the pieces that in old age he mistakenly remembered having published in the Philadelphia Saturday Evening Post, another weekly. Although he mistook the place of publication, there is no reason to doubt what he told Albert Bigelow Paine about his reaction: “Seeing them in print was a joy which rather exceeded anything in that line I have ever experienced since.”4

This youthful “joy” shortly prompted new essays, for within a few months Clemens had discovered another, albeit less challenging, way to publish his work. In 1871, looking back on his early career, he recalled that in September 1852 his “uncle” (in reality, Orion) had left Hannibal “to be gone a week,” placing him, the apprentice, in [begin page 7] charge. Clemens wrote, “He . . . asked me if I thought I could edit one issue of the paper judiciously. Ah, didn't I want to try!”5 In Orion's absence Clemens wrote and published at least four items in the Hannibal Journal, including the ambitious “Historical Exhibition—A No. 1 Ruse” (no. 7) and two irreverent jibes at J. T. Hinton, local editor of the competing Hannibal Tri-Weekly Messenger: “ ‘Local’ Resolves to Commit Suicide” (no. 5) and, one week later, “ ‘Pictur'’ Department” (no. 6). The last two sketches, in their personal and altogether shrewd satire, raised more of a commotion than the young author anticipated. Although Orion returned to smooth things over with Hinton, the damage had been done. Clemens recalled in 1871 that he thought both pieces “desperately funny” and was “densely unconscious that there was any moral obliquity about such a publication.”6

Hinton's impassioned but somewhat dull-witted response may have temporarily chastened the youthful satirist, for from November until the following May (1853) he seems not to have returned to print. Then while Orion was away again Clemens took charge of the paper (by then a daily) and wrote and published still another “feud,” this time a week-long imaginary dispute between three correspondents (“Rambler,” “Grumbler,” and “Peter Pencilcase's Son, John Snooks”) about a poem's subtitle, “To Miss Katie of H———l” (nos. 11–16). Even though Orion professed dismay on returning home, he was wise enough to value such work and to continue to publish it: “Oh, She Has a Red Head!” (no. 18) and “The Burial of Sir Abner Gilstrap” (no. 19) are some of the most interesting products of this period, and they show Clemens' early eclectic bent.

Orion belatedly promoted his brother to “assistant editor” and gave him his first regular writing assignment, “Our Assistant's Column,” which Clemens filled until the end of the month. But such a privilege was not sufficient to keep the young man at home, and late in May 1853 he left Hannibal for St. Louis, where he worked briefly as a printer before traveling to other jobs in New York, Philadelphia, Washington, and once again the Midwest, eventually resuming work under Orion in 1855–1856, this time in his brother's Ben Franklin [begin page 8] Book and Job Office in Keokuk, Iowa. From mid-1853 until Clemens left for Nevada in mid-1861 we have little concrete evidence of his literary interests, but we do know from the eight pieces written during this period that he continued to explore his talents. In November 1870 he recalled in the Galaxy a youthful upsurge of literary ambition that must have overtaken him when he first worked in St. Louis:

Clemens went on to explain, however, that as he approached the newspaper office his self-confidence gradually disappeared, and a mere word from the editor put him to flight, the manuscripts still in his pocket.

This is an interesting recollection, even though it is probably hyperbolic. Clemens' characterization of himself as both ambitious and confident is balanced by the recognition that he was also “green and ignorant, wordy, pompously-assertive, ungrammatical, and with a vague, distorted knowledge of men and the world acquired in a back-country village.” The would-be author, Clemens recalled, had reached out for fame, naively unaware that beginning writers must first submit to “the same tedious, ill-paid apprenticeship” required of beginners in other professions.8

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The recollection coincides with another memory of himself at this time which Clemens set down in 1876—a response to a letter from a boyhood friend, J. H. Burrough:

His callowness and self-righteousness are perhaps exaggerated in retrospect, but they may have contributed to still another unsuccessful effort to publish his work, this time in Philadelphia. Paine reported in 1912 that Clemens said only that his efforts at this time “were not received with approval.”10 Still, before returning to St. Louis Clemens dispatched several travel letters to the Muscatine Journal published by his brother Orion, and in 1856 he published the “Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass” letters in the Keokuk Post, earning five dollars apiece for his work.11

Four items in the present collection were written in 1855–1856, and three of them were clearly never intended for publication: poems written in the private autograph albums of his sister-in-law Mollie and of a young friend, Ann Virginia Ruffner, who was visiting Keokuk (“To Mollie,” no. 21; “Lines” and “To Jennie,” nos. 22 and 23). A fourth item, “Jul'us Caesar” (no. 20), was almost certainly designed to be published; it survives in the author's manuscript in part because he never printed it. “Jul'us Caesar” bears some evidence of Clemens' youthful callowness. It offers a satirical portrait of a young country bumpkin whom the author and a companion lure into putting on airs—first as a “writer” and then as a “painter.” The sketch has several flashes of talent—including a wonderful parody of conventional nature poetry (“The Storm”)—but it falls short of those sketches that the author would publish while he worked as a pilot on the river.

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In April 1857 Clemens abandoned his work as a printer and apprenticed himself to a Mississippi steamboat pilot, Horace E. Bixby. Bixby recalled that as a young pilot Clemens “was always scribbling when not at the wheel,”12 but this memory, though certainly plausible, is borne out only to a limited extent by letters and manuscripts, and by known published work. In fact, during the four years Clemens spent on the river he produced only four known sketches, three of which drew on his experience as a pilot. Of these four pieces, two remained unpublished. It seems likely that there was little time for literature during his initial months as a cub pilot, for as Clemens told his brother on 9 March 1858, he could not write to the newspapers because “when one is learning the river, he is not allowed to do or think about anything else.”13

The most famous of Clemens' three river pieces appeared in May 1859, shortly after he received his pilot's license. “River Intelligence” (no. 24) was published anonymously as part of the daily river column in the New Orleans Crescent and was well received by at least one portion of the very specialized audience at which it was aimed—Clemens' fellow pilots. The sketch was widely reprinted in newspapers in 1871–1872, when Mark Twain began making a national reputation, and he himself acknowledged it in chapter 50 of Life on the Mississippi and, implicitly, through Paine's remarks in the biography.14 “River Intelligence” exemplifies the author's early fascination with vernacular eccentrics and it is a minor masterpiece of satirical burlesque on the smugly omniscient manner of Captain Isaiah Sellers, an old and experienced river pilot given to pontification. Like Clemens' earlier satirical target, J. T. Hinton, Sellers appears to have taken the sketch rather more seriously than the author anticipated, and in 1883 Clemens declared that he regretted the severity or at least the public character of his remarks:

This was to be an important lesson of Clemens' apprenticeship, but it was one he did not thoroughly grasp until he had left Nevada and California.

Although Clemens had earlier lost his nerve on the threshold of the St. Louis Missouri Republican, he did publish his second river piece in that journal: “Pilot's Memoranda” (no. 26) appeared in the river column in August 1860. This unique burlesque was, like “River Intelligence,” written for his fellow pilots, and it depends even more heavily on their intimate technical knowledge of the river to achieve its humorous effects. It is aimed quite broadly at the self-important style of pilots' newspaper reports—their tendency to boast or to report the obvious—and as such it pokes good-humored fun at their idiosyncrasies while it invites them to smile at a joke that only they can share. Perhaps more significantly, it anticipates one of Clemens' most promising and fruitful techniques: mixing the truth with fiction in a way that makes the work neither a tall tale nor a hoax, but something in between.

The only attempts at straightforward fiction which Clemens is known to have written at this time both survive in manuscript and were, like “Jul'us Caesar,” left unpublished by the author. “Ghost Life on the Mississippi” (no. 27) depends to some degree on technical knowledge of the river, but its intended audience is manifestly larger than the pilot brotherhood. Clemens' niece, Annie Moffett, recalled hearing him recite or read the sketch in St. Louis around the time he left for Nevada (1861), and this suggests that it was a self-conscious literary effort deriving from oral tradition on the river. The sketch is surprisingly mature in its narrative technique and in its creation of suspense, though at the same time it has several small structural flaws.

A closely related sketch, “The Mysterious Murders in Risse” (no. 25), was written in the summer of 1859, just after “River Intelligence.” It is a gothic tale of murder and revenge, cast in the fictional towns of Risse and Lun, Germany, and although the young author's handling of his material is sometimes wooden and awkward, the tale shows him struggling to control the basic tools of narrative and suspense. [begin page 12] Like “Ghost Life,” it suggests that even without a regular opportunity to publish his work the young pilot continued to nurture some kind of literary ambition.

2. Nevada Territory: 1862–1864. The impending Civil War closed down steamboat traffic on the Mississippi and threw Clemens out of work: despite a persistent—and eventually productive—nostalgia for his pilot days, he never returned to the wheel. For a while he lived in St. Louis with his mother and sister, Jane Clemens and Pamela Moffett, and his sister's family. There in the spring of 1861 he watched the intensifying hostilities between North and South and the secession of the Confederacy. His own political sympathies wavered, but that summer he and some Hannibal friends of “Secesh” persuasion organized the Marion Rangers and briefly went to war—a story that he recounted in “The Private History of the Campaign That Failed” (1885). Having soon had his fill of warfare, Clemens agreed to accompany Orion, and to assist him, in his recently won appointment as secretary of the Territory of Nevada. President Lincoln had signed Orion's commission on 27 March 1861, but it was not until June 26 that the secretary's instructions were dispatched to him.16 Exactly one month later—only a few days after Bull Run—the two brothers left St. Joseph by overland stagecoach, arriving in Carson City on August 14.17

It has recently been shown that one of Clemens' earliest activities in Nevada was to serve his brother as clerk during the first session of the Territorial Legislature—from October 1 through November 29. He earned eight dollars a day—a significant supplement to his brother's small income—and he also became acquainted with Washoe politicians, men like William M. Gillespie and William H. Barstow. Having completed his clerkship, Clemens acknowledged payment on December 4 and turned his full attention to the problem of striking it rich.18 Even before this his letters home told of timber claims on the [begin page 13] shores of Lake Tahoe and speculation in mining stock (or “feet”). By late January 1862 he was feeling sanguine about success, which he predicted would come by the following July: “I think that by that time some of our claims will be paying handsomely,” he told Orion's wife, Mollie, “and we could have a house fit to live in—and servants to do your work.”19 He himself engaged in arduous prospecting, both in Humboldt and Esmeralda counties; he and several friends formed the Clemens Gold and Silver Mining Company, and he eventually held stock in, and claims to, a number of mining ventures20—all of which came, finally, to nothing.

Clemens' reminiscences in later life suggest that when mining failed him he drifted more or less unwillingly and by chance into newspaper work. But contemporary documents show that well before he was forced to abandon the search for gold he was contributing letters to the newspapers and was actively interested in becoming a regular correspondent. On 30 January, 20 March, and 10 May 1862 he wrote three long, wonderfully humorous travel letters that were published in the Keokuk Gate City.21 And probably in April he had begun sending letters signed “Josh” to the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. Clemens recalled in chapter 42 of Roughing It that at the time he had amused himself “with writing letters to the chief paper of the Territory,” and that he “had always been surprised” when these were actually published. “My good opinion of the editors had steadily declined; for it seemed to me that they might have found something better to fill up with than my literature.”22 Yet this diffidence is clearly facetious, and there were, moreover, other signs of his reawakened interest in writing. On May 12 Clemens told Orion that he had helped his mining partner, Horatio Phillips, write a letter to the Carson City Silver Age; and he indicated that he, or his partner, would “drop a line to the ‘Age’ occasionally” in the future, adding that he supposed Orion saw his “letters in the ‘Enterprize.’ ”23

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Clemens' association with the Enterprise came about through one of the men he had met during the first session of the legislature: William H. Barstow, who worked in the business office of the Enterprise. Barstow not only accepted the “Josh” letters and knew that Clemens was their author, he apparently wanted to reprint the letters of the young correspondent to the Gate City. On May 17 Clemens wrote Orion that he hoped Barstow would “leave the ‘S.L.C.’ off my Gate City letters, in case he publishes them.”24 By late June, however, Clemens had ceased to correspond with the Gate City, allegedly for want of time. Even so, the “Josh” letters to the Enterprise continued to appear, and Clemens was anything but indifferent to their publication. On June 22 he complained with some bitterness to Orion, “Those Enterprise fellows make perfect nonsense of my letters—like all d—d fool printers, they can't follow the punctuation as it is in the manuscript. They have, by this means made a mass of senseless, d—d stupidity out of my last letter.”25 This is not the sentiment of an author who was chagrined to see his work published.

While Clemens claimed lack of time to write to the Gate City, he was in fact aiming at still other professional writing commitments. William M. Gillespie, another acquaintance from the legislature, was evidently planning to begin his own newspaper—and had invited Clemens to write for it. On June 25 Clemens wrote Orion: “If Gillespie gets up a large paper, it will suit me exactly to correspond for it. I shall not refuse pay, either, although $4 or $5 a week could hardly be called extensive when you write by the ‘column,’ you know. I am his man, though. Let me know further about his paper.”26 The project was still alive on July 9, when Clemens again wrote his brother from Esmeralda: “Gillespie talks reasonably now, and I shall try and be ready for him as soon as he starts his paper. Tell him not to secure a San Francisco correspondent for the winter, because they do nothing here during the winter months, and I want the job myself. I want to spend the winter in California. When will his first number be published, and where?” Clemens reiterated that he was tempted to “write a correspondence for the ‘Age,’ ” but that “want of time” would “not permit it.”27

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The aspiring correspondent did not get to spend the winter in California—at least not that year—but it is clear that by June 1862 he had already formulated plans to write regularly for some newspaper. Gillespie's project failed to materialize, however, and Clemens apparently never did correspond for the Silver Age. But in late July, when his debts mounted and his capital was exhausted, he applied in earnest for newspaper work. He asked Orion on July 23 to recommend him to “the Sacramento Union folks,” to whom he was almost certainly known through their political correspondent, Andrew J. Marsh. “Tell them I'll write as many letters a week as they want, for $10 a week—my board must be paid. Tell them I have corresponded with the N. Orleans Crescent, and other papers—and the Enterprise. . . . If they want letters from here, who'll run from morning till night collecting materials cheaper[?] I'll write a short letter twice a week for the present for the ‘Age,’ for $5 per week.”28

Orion did write a letter to the Sacramento Union, but before any reply could be returned Clemens received a concrete offer from Barstow, his friend at the Enterprise office. “I hope you will receive an answer right away,” he told Orion about the Union application, “because Barstow has offered me the post of local reporter for the Enterprise at $25 a week, and I have written him that I will let him know next mail if possible, whether I can take it or not. If G. is not sure of starting his paper within a month, I think I had better close with Barstow's offer.”29 On August 7, evidently still without hearing from the Sacramento Union or Gillespie, Clemens told Orion that he had accepted the Enterprise job. Barstow had renewed his offer and Clemens had replied: “I wrote him that I guessed I would take it, and asked him how long before I must come up there. I have not heard from him since.”30 There was, evidently, no special urgency—and Clemens did not begin work until sometime in late September. The first extant articles that he probably wrote as a salaried reporter (see Appendix B1, volume 1) appeared in the October 1 issue; the first that he indubitably wrote—“Petrified Man” (no. 28)—appeared in the Enterprise on October 4.

The Virginia City Territorial Enterprise had been owned by [begin page 16] Joseph T. Goodman and Denis E. McCarthy for about one year; it was published daily (except Monday) and was rapidly becoming both a popular and a financial success. Rollin M. Daggett, twice editor of the Enterprise, recalled in 1893 that in these early years “there was probably no paper in the West that exerted so great an influence as the Territorial Enterprise. . . . It occupied the same field in Nevada as did the Sacramento Union in California.”31 Despite this influence, which was just beginning when Clemens joined the paper, the Enterprise evinced a youthful and often irreverent nature, largely because of Goodman's influence (he was twenty-four in 1862). “Original, forcible, confident, mocking and alive with the impulses of an abounding and generous youth, the Enterprise was to Goodman a safety-valve for his ideas rather than a daily burden of responsibility,” according to Arthur McEwen. “There never has been a paper like the Enterprise on the Coast since and never can be again—never one so entirely human, so completely the reflex of a splendid personality and a mining camp's buoyant life.”32 Even allowing for a pardonable exaggeration here, it is clear that the Enterprise offered Clemens an extraordinary opportunity in 1862—one that he fully and promptly exploited. By August 1863 he could “boast of having the widest reputation as a local editor, of any man on the Pacific coast.”33 And when he finally left Virginia City behind him in May 1864, this reputation had grown still more formidable.

The Enterprise owners were interested in Clemens for several reasons: they had been pleased with his volunteer “Josh” letters, which demonstrated his superior humorous talents; they would soon need someone to replace their local editor, Dan De Quille (William Wright), who was planning a trip back East; and finally they knew that Clemens had been the gregarious “clerk” who served his brother, Secretary Clemens, in the first session of the legislature—a fact that might make him a good political reporter and would almost certainly make him a political influence.

In 1893 Rollin Daggett recalled that one “Josh” letter had been [begin page 17] particularly suggestive of Clemens' powers as a humorist:

Neither this “bogus” oration nor any other of the “Josh” letters is extant, but in 1906 Clemens recalled the events referred to by Daggett in a way that illuminates what these early Enterprise contributions must have been like.

The mock oration seems to have been in the same vein of burlesque that informed Clemens' earlier sketch on Isaiah Sellers (“River Intelligence,” on. 24)—a “smart imitation” of the judge's all too predictable style, offered as a transparent hoax at his expense. However, Clemens simplified events somewhat. Dan De Quille was indeed [begin page 18] planning a trip back East, but we now know that he did not actually leave Virginia City until December 27—about three months after Clemens joined the staff. The record indicates that Clemens must have worked with Dan for part of September and all of October, learning the ropes as local editor. This phase of his apprenticeship was interrupted, however, when the paper sent him to Carson City to cover the second session of the Territorial Legislature, which convened on November 11 and did not adjourn until December 20. Clemens' previous experience with the legislators, as well as his relationship to Secretary Clemens, were obvious assets, despite his inexperience as a political reporter. He was, for instance, almost certainly instrumental in securing for the Enterprise a lucrative contract to publish the laws of the session—a contract that had previously been held by the rival Virginia City Union.36

Clemens did not return to Virginia City until late December 1862. When Dan departed by overland stagecoach, Clemens took over the sole responsibility for the Enterprise local columns—a job that he filled, with several interruptions, until Dan returned to join him early in September 1863. Clemens' first contribution in his new capacity, “The Illustrious Departed” (no. 32), a humorous farewell to his friend Dan, is the first of eight short imaginative local items reprinted here. All eight appeared in the Enterprise column during the brief period before Clemens publicly adopted the name “Mark Twain” early in February 1863.

Although Clemens wrote almost continuously for the Enterprise between September 1862 and June 1864, our knowledge of what he wrote is severely limited: there is no extant file of the paper for those years. The office files owned by Goodman were destroyed in the 1875 fire that leveled Virginia City; two other complete files, both in San Francisco, were destroyed by the earthquake and fire which struck that city in 1906.37 Even Clemens' own records—the “coffin of ‘Enterprise’ files” that Orion sent him in March 1870 as he began writing Roughing It 38—have been, for the most part, either lost or destroyed. Thus the forty pieces reprinted here have been gleaned [begin page 19] from a wide variety of anomalous resources: a few family scrapbooks (what remained of the “coffin”) which came to light in 1954; scattered clippings in the William Wright Papers; scrapbooks in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale; a few stray copies of the Enterprise in western libraries; nineteenth-century histories and anthologies compiled before 1906; and contemporary newspapers and journals in California and Nevada, which frequently reprinted items from the Enterprise. It seems clear that, under such limiting circumstances, some of Clemens' political writings from Carson City, some of his out-of-town newspaper letters, and most of his routine reports and daily local items have vanished with the Enterprise itself. Certainly none of our present resources is anything like exhaustive: each contains items not to be found in the others.

Still it may be hoped that none of Clemens' most ambitious work failed to be preserved in one way or another, for Dan De Quille was probably correct when he recalled in 1893 that while Mark Twain worked on the Enterprise “he wrote no long stories or sketches for that paper.”39 Indeed, only four Enterprise sketches collected here assume the aspect of humorous fiction: “Ye Sentimental Law Student” (no. 44), “City Marshal Perry” (no. 49), “Mark Twain—More of Him” (no. 64), and “Washoe.—‘Information Wanted’ ” (no. 75). These are probably as close to being fully developed literary sketches as anything he published in that paper.

The chief interest of what Clemens did write, however, lies in the way it anticipates his fiction, exhibiting with marvelous nonchalance his native gift of phrase, his talent for assimilating and appreciating slang, and of course his inexorable drift toward humor. Four routine reports included here—“The Spanish Mine” (no. 29), “The Spanish” (no. 30), “Silver Bars—How Assayed” (no. 43), and “Examination of Teachers” (no. 48)—show numerous small touches of humor, even in the face of the implacably factual. The same tendency is present in the briefest local items, like “Due Notice” (no. 38) and “Our Stock Remarks” (no. 33). And the capacity for humorous fiction is of course present in comic hoaxes like “Petrified Man” (no. 28) and “A Bloody Massacre near Carson” (no. 66), as well as in the running, good- [begin page 20] natured “feuds” he carried on with the Unreliable (Clement T. Rice of the Virginia City Union) and later with his Enterprise partner, Dan De Quille.

McEwen recalled in 1893 that the local department of the Enterprise as conducted by Mark Twain and Dan De Quille was “noble” in its “indifference to ‘news.’ ”40 Even judging from the few surviving items, unevenly winnowed by time and chance, we can see that this “indifference to ‘news’ ” amounted to a style of reporting—a style at which Clemens was particularly adept, and to which he contributed his own personal characteristics. Consider, for example, two brief—wholly inconsequential—squibs that appeared in the columns of the Enterprise, the first one shortly after Clemens teamed up with Dan in September 1862, the second shortly after he took over on his own later that year:

Although the assertion cannot be proved, Clemens almost certainly wrote both items. The first belongs to the western tall-tale genre (variety, “Washoe zephyr”), even though it is apparently based upon fact. Its deadpan account of an occurrence of some seriousness—and probably of some embarrassment—to the “guests” moves it out of the [begin page 21] realm of pure news and into that of humor. The second item, which cavalierly dismisses a street brawl in order to comment ironically on the insatiable public appetite for “a man for breakfast,” is less an item of news than a philosophic observation. Each item, moreover, employs diction and techniques and even subjects that Clemens would use again and again in more ambitious items. “Frightful Accident to Dan De Quille” (no. 73) is a fine example of a comic disaster loosely based on the facts; and “A Duel Prevented” (no. 56) highlights the reporter's alleged disappointment when a duel is stopped by officers of the law—the genre of the “missed item.” “A Gale” and “Free Fight” show us that the routine work that Clemens produced daily for nearly two years was not entirely perfunctory: it formed a seed bed for later, maturer work much more like his fictions.

The “indifference to ‘news’ ” also gave rise, as Clemens himself noted, to the outright hoax. In Roughing It he said that “stirring news . . . was what a paper needed, and I felt that I was peculiarly endowed with the ability to furnish it.”43 Before that, in February 1868, he asserted that purely fictional “news items” were often included in his columns:

Clemens' carefully contrived hoaxes, including “Petrified Man” (no. 28) and “A Bloody Massacre near Carson” (no. 66), eventually became his most infamous contributions to the western press, but it is clear that both were written within a subliterary tradition that permitted and even encouraged an indifference to news.

Although in February 1863 he had been serving as local editor for only about one month, Clemens persuaded Goodman to grant him a week's vacation in Carson City. From there he sent three long comic [begin page 22] letters (nos. 40, 41, and 42), signed for the first time “Mark Twain.” Although these letters conveyed some news, their chief import was a relaxed, informal kind of humor—personal narrative, the genre that became Mark Twain's chief literary form. On February 9 “Isreal Putnam” wrote to tell Clemens that John Nugent, a close friend of the late John Phoenix (George H. Derby), had inquired of him “who Mark Twain was, and added that he had not seen so amusing a thing in newspaper literature in a long while as your letter in the Enterprise this morning.”45 Clearly Nugent's favorable response was widely shared. On February 16 Clemens, by then back in Virginia City, told his family that his employers “haven't much confidence in me now. If they have, I am proud to say it is misplaced.” He added, “I am very well satisfied here. They pay me six dollars a day, and I make 50 per cent. profit by only doing three dollars' worth of work.”46 As this letter indicates (and as he later recalled in chapter 44 of Roughing It), Goodman had made his salary “forty dollars a week,” a significant raise above the original twenty-five.47

Mark Twain had achieved sufficient stature with the Enterprise by May 1863 to earn a more extended vacation, this time in San Francisco. He and Rice spent May and June there, and Clemens apparently wrote only very occasionally to the Enterprise. On June 4 he told his family that he had “lived like a lord—to make up for two years of privation, you know,” and that he had not “written to the paper but twice. . . . I have always got something more agreeable on hand.”48 Both of these San Francisco letters are reprinted here (nos. 53 and 64).

Despite the paucity of his Enterprise correspondence, he was about to enter upon an important contract with the San Francisco Morning Call. In mid-May he told his family, “They want me to correspond with one of these dailies here, & if they will pay me enough I'll do it. (The pay is only a ‘blind’—I'll correspond anyhow. If I don't know how to make such a thing pay me . . . who does, I should like to know?)”49 When he returned to Virginia City early in July he sent the first of ten letters to the Call: portions of four are reprinted in [begin page 23] this collection, and they record an important step in Mark Twain's career—the first effort to amuse a sophisticated city audience with his yarns. “ ‘Mark Twain's’ Letter” (no. 59), for instance, contains his first version (“A Rich Decision”) of “The Facts in the Great Land-Slide Case” (no. 286), a sketch that would eventually find its way into Roughing It. At this time Clemens also made contact with the San Francisco Golden Era, a literary weekly to which he would contribute several sketches in the fall of 1863: “How to Cure a Cold” (no. 63), “The Lick House Ball” (no. 65), and “The Great Prize Fight”; all are signs of his ambition to move beyond the local columns of the Enterprise into more genuinely literary work.

The Golden Era sketches began to appear when Clemens returned to San Francisco on September 6—shortly after Dan De Quille arrived back in Virginia City from the East. It was presumably these contributions that Fitzhugh Ludlow (another Era contributor) had in mind when, in November 1863, he publicly praised their author: “In funny literature,” he wrote in the Era, “that Irresistible Washoe Giant, Mark Twain, takes quite a unique position. He makes me laugh more than any Californian since poor Derby died. He imitates nobody. He is a school by himself.”50 This was high praise, and it was soon endorsed and amplified by yet another major American humorist when he visited Virginia City in mid-December 1863: Artemus Ward. Early in January 1864, after telling his family that Ludlow had “published a high encomium upon Mark Twain, (the same being eminently just & truthful, I beseech you to believe,) in a San Francisco paper,” Clemens continued: “Artemus Ward said that when my gorgeous talents were publicly acknowledged by such high authority, I ought to appreciate them myself—leave sage-brush obscurity, & journey to New York with him, as he wanted me to do. But I preferred not to burst upon the New York public too suddenly & brilliantly, & so I concluded to remain here.”51 Despite this diffidence, Mark Twain was persuaded to send some of his work to the New York Sunday Mercury by Ward's promise to intervene with the editors on his behalf. By mid-January 1864 he had sent two sketches that were accepted by the Mercury: “Doings in Nevada” and “Those Blasted Children” (no. 72). Clemens' plans to write occasionally for the [begin page 24] Mercury, however, failed to materialize: it would not be until he moved to California that he would again successfully venture into the eastern press.

One aspect of Clemens' development in this two-year period in Nevada deserves special notice: the emergence of Mark Twain as a public figure whose way of reporting the news, whose peculiar expressions (“so to speak,” “they shoved,” “infernal humbug,” “from hell to breakfast”), and whose very comings and goings were themselves news.52 Because from the beginning of his Nevada journalism Clemens wrote about himself, and because his talents as a writer and as a public speaker—what Paine called his “matchless gift of phrase”53—were manifestly out of the ordinary, he became the object of considerable attention in the press, a combination of celebrity and journalist. Mark Twain was a highly adaptable, partly fictional version of Clemens himself. Shortly before he adopted the pseudonym, for instance, he presented himself as a brash, socially inept reporter whose supposed obtuseness and awkward predicaments supplied the real interest of his amusing report “The Sanitary Ball” (no. 37). This bumbling figure assumed much greater autonomy and complexity when he adopted the name “Mark Twain.” In his more exuberant moods he exhibited an extraordinary capacity for ridicule and vituperation, but above all for exaggeration of all kinds. This last element—the reporter's supposed inability to keep the facts straight or to report anything without comic elaboration—became the most prominent element of his public character. The reporter who could be forgiven for making up items about hay wagons and pack trains (as he recalled in Roughing It) soon became one who wrote more pointed hoaxes, and then in turn one who explicitly assumed the role of yarn spinner and teller of tall tales.

The disposition to elaborate was part of Mark Twain's mask, but we may be sure that the disposition had its origins in Clemens' own character, even as a boy in Hannibal. In 1906 he recalled that Jimmy McDaniel “was the first human being to whom I ever told a humorous [begin page 25] story, so far as I can remember. This was about Jim Wolfe and the cats; and I gave him that tale the morning after that memorable episode. I thought he would laugh his remaining teeth out. I had never been so proud and happy before, and I have seldom been so proud and happy since.”54 The facts here suffered their usual transformation, no doubt, and it was not until 1867 that Clemens (writing for the Mercury) rendered his earliest tale in truly professional form through the voice of Simon Wheeler. Still, the disposition toward “yarning” clearly preceded his ventures into print. Calvin Higbie, Clemens' Aurora mining partner in 1861, recalled that the story-telling impulse was evident in Clemens even before he began writing to the Enterprise, and that it compelled friendship despite his proverbial laziness. Higbie remembered that Clemens would do no physical labor around the cabin (certainly an exaggeration), but—“He could tell stories!”

This native talent fully informed Clemens' work as an Enterprise reporter, whether the subject was mining, politics, or the latest street brawl.

Indeed, in December 1862, when Clemens first became an official reporter of the Territorial Legislature, his fellow reporter Andrew J. Marsh of the Sacramento Union recorded that a member of the house introduced a resolution “highly complimentary to the powers of imagination possessed by one of the reporters for a Territorial paper, and after a thrilling discussion, which jealousy prevents me from reporting verbatim, the resolution was laid on the table. Sic transit, etc.” In the unpublished manuscript “Journal Proceedings of the House, 1862,” the inventive reporter is identified as Samuel Clemens [begin page 26] “of the Territorial Enterprise,” who was asked to “restrain his imagination and confine himself to the truth” when reporting the words of “members on this floor.”56 The impulse to embroider the facts was, even at this early date, recognized as Clemens' distinguishing idiosyncrasy. In Nevada Mark Twain's reputation for elaboration was sometimes criticized—he was unfavorably compared to Ananias—but his inability to keep fact and fancy apart eventually became a permanent part of his professional literary equipment: “Mr. Mark Twain . . . he told the truth, mainly.” Clemens' apprenticeship on the Enterprise was in this specific sense a preparation for his career as an author of fiction; even when his work is most like conventional journalism, we find his humorous sensibility coloring the report and dominating the interest of these ephemera.

3. California: 1864–1866. On 29 May 1864 Clemens left Nevada by California stagecoach, turning his back on a bitter quarrel with James L. Laird of the Virginia City Union over the integrity of pledges made to the United States Sanitary Fund. The controversy provided a strong impulse to leave his berth on the Enterprise and, although he did not plan it this way, to make a new start in San Francisco. Apparently Clemens first intended to remain in California only a few weeks while he sold his mining stocks, but he eventually stayed for most of the next two and one-half years. At first he roomed in luxury at the Occidental Hotel—“Heaven on the half shell”57 to the harried reporter, fresh from the anxiety and the alkali of Washoe. But when the depression in stocks worsened, and the value of his own holdings seriously declined, he resolved to stay on, take a job, and work long enough “to make ‘a stake.’ ”58

About June 6, within a few days of his arrival in San Francisco, Clemens became the local reporter (at forty dollars a week) on the San Francisco Morning Call, which had solicited his letters from Virginia City the previous year. He remained on the Call staff just four [begin page 27] months, until the end of September, although the “fearful drudgery, soulless drudgery”59 of the job led him to accept in his final month a reduction in salary to only twenty-five dollars a week in return for shorter working hours. Working for the Call was much more taxing than working for the Enterprise, where he had shared the burden with other reporters and had enjoyed the same pay with much more freedom. Even so, the job kept him professionally active and, to a considerable degree, creatively alert. He ventured local items, for instance, that truly tested the limits of editorial permissiveness, as in “No Earthquake,” published on 23 August 1864:

This squib belongs to the same genre Clemens practiced in his Enterprise column (it is a variation on the “missed item”), but it is a shade more subtle and certainly more risqué. In general, Clemens handled his daily reporting for the Call with undiminished inventiveness and flair (“supernatural boot-jack”) which is the more remarkable because it was so much more anonymous. The nine Call sketches (as distinct from letters) reprinted here are not wholly representative, but they are all good examples of his capacity for humorous reporting that verged on fiction. “What a Sky-Rocket Did” (no. 81) belongs to the family of hoaxes he began in Nevada, although it did not cause the same kind of commotion. “Inexplicable News from San José” (no. 87) is a brief, thoroughly fictional account that may have originally been intended for the Golden Era. And four brief items (nos. 82–85) on the new Chinese Temple in San Francisco show Mark Twain at his genial best.

Although Clemens published hundreds of items in the Call, it is [begin page 28] apparent that in July and August 1864 he was seriously questioning his career as a writer. John McComb recalled a conversation with him in 1864, when Clemens was “city editor of the Morning Call.” According to McComb, they met at the corner of Clay and Montgomery streets and Clemens said, “Mac, I've done my last newspaper work; I'm going back East.” He had secured an appointment to act as a government pilot on the Mississippi, for a salary of $300 a month, and he planned to take the job. McComb, who “conceived a high regard for his literary ability,” urged against this radical step:

After listening carefully to this admonition, and thinking it through, Clemens is reported to have told McComb, “Now, Mac, I've taken your advice. I thought it all over last night, and finally I wrote to Washington declining the appointment, and so I'll stick to the newspaper work a while longer.”62

Clemens did more than “stick to the newspaper work.” In late June and early July he had continued his earlier connection with the Golden Era, publishing two wonderfully comic sketches: “The Evidence in the Case of Smith vs. Jones” and “Early Rising, As Regards Excursions to the Cliff House” (nos. 78–79). But, prompted by McComb's encouragement, he soon made other arrangements as well. On September 25 he wrote his family:

Three days later he told Orion and Mollie that while the Californian only paid him twelve dollars an article, it had “an exalted reputation in the east, & is liberally copied from by papers like the Home Journal.” And in this same letter he indicated that he would soon begin work “on my book,” presumably an early experiment to work up his western experiences.64 Clemens seems, in other words, to have taken McComb's advice to “strike up higher” in all seriousness.

Although Charles Henry Webb had founded the Californian on 29 May 1864, Bret Harte, the editor in September 1864, was almost certainly the one who solicited Clemens' work. “A Notable Conundrum” (no. 91) appeared on October 1, and after that the Californian became Mark Twain's chief literary outlet for the rest of 1864 and again during the spring and summer of 1865. Although later in 1865 and in 1866 he continued to appear occasionally in its columns, it was at intervals of much greater length. The present collection reprints twenty-five contributions to the Californian from these years: self-consciously wrought, and (to Clemens' great satisfaction) meticulously printed, they constitute his most deliberately literary work of the period.

The routine of Clemens' urban existence was broken in early December 1864 by a three-month stay in some of the played-out mining camps of Tuolumne and Calaveras counties. On December 4 he arrived at Jim Gillis' cabin on Jackass Hill and, for the most part, remained there and at nearby Angel's Camp (the latter from 22 January to 20 February 1865) until he returned to San Francisco on February 26. There he found, as he wrote in his notebook, “letters from ‘Artemus Ward’ asking me to write a sketch for his new book of Nevada Territory travels which is soon to come out.” He added, “Too late—ought to have got the letters 3 months ago. They are dated early in November.”65

But the brief moratorium he had enjoyed in those three months away from San Francisco would have extraordinary literary conse- [begin page 30] quences for him. At Jackass Hill he heard Jim Gillis and his partner Dick Stoker tell yarns he later turned to superb literary use. He recorded tag lines in his notebook to remind him of memorable incidents and characters, anecdotes, turns of phrase, and personal mining experiences in Nevada—material that eventually found its way into Roughing It, A Tramp Abroad, and Huckleberry Finn. But for immediate value, the most important thing he heard was the germ of the “Jumping Frog” tale, an anecdote told by Ben Coon at Angel's Camp in early February. It was not until mid-October 1865 that Clemens succeeded in writing his most famous tale (addressed to Ward), but in the intervening months he tried several times to make use of material from the mining camps. When he returned to San Francisco he continued to publish work in the Californian: “An Unbiased Criticism” (no. 100), which appeared on 18 March 1865, used a vernacular narrator, Coon, obviously inspired by mining-camp storytellers. Coon was an early version of Simon Wheeler, who first appeared in another Californian sketch in June 1865: “Answers to Correspondents” (no. 107) contained his enthusiastic endorsement of “He Done His Level Best.” And, of course, Wheeler reappeared as the narrator in “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog” (no. 119), published by the New York Saturday Press in November 1865. Moreover, we now know that in addition to these three sketches Mark Twain wrote two preliminary efforts in which he exploited Wheeler's narrative powers. Presumably these were completed and abandoned before he sent the finished “Jumping Frog” sketch, belatedly, to Ward: they are published here for the first time and include “The Only Reliable Account of the Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” (no. 117) and “Angel's Camp Constable” (no. 118).

When Clemens resumed his contributions to the Californian in March 1865 he began to pursue other outlets as well. Probably by mid-June he had begun a correspondence with the Enterprise that soon developed into daily letters, for which he received $100 a month; this arrangement continued into 1866. Because no file of the Enterprise is extant, relatively few of these letters survive. Our knowledge of the Enterprise letters of 1865 and 1866 derives from one scrapbook in which Clemens preserved part or all of some twenty letters, and from California and Nevada papers that sometimes reprinted excerpts. These excerpts range in length from substantial sketches to merely [begin page 31] ephemeral and pungent squibs that give only a fragment of the original letter, as in the following paragraph reprinted in the Call:

Fortunately for us, Mark Twain was considered “good copy” even in so slight a paragraph as this.

When Clemens came to California he was well known as a newspaper humorist and enjoyed at least a local reputation (in Nevada) as a witty speaker for select occasions. The first and last pieces from the California section record successful talks before San Francisco audiences, but they also provide a measure of how rapidly and how fully his reputation grew in that two-year period. The first talk was a “presentation” speech before a group of appreciative males (“Parting Presentation,” no. 76); the last was a celebrity's farewell to the population at large (“ ‘Mark Twain's’ Farewell,” no. 200). As we have seen, this transformation from local editor to traveling celebrity occurred gradually. Clemens was widely recognized as an outstanding contributor to the Golden Era and then to the Californian; the Gold Hill News, for instance, asserted in July 1865 that he was a major reason for the superior quality of that “most excellent weekly newspaper,” the Californian.67

Indeed, in mid- and late 1865 there was a rising tide of appreciation to which Clemens was certainly attentive. On September 9 the New York Round Table broadly characterized American humor and surveyed native humorists in general:

This is an important commentary, in part because it came well before Mark Twain published the “Jumping Frog” story (the Round Table editor must have seen things reprinted from the Californian, as Clemens himself had anticipated), and in part because we may be sure that the comment encouraged Mark Twain to pursue his career as a writer. The editors of the San Francisco Dramatic Chronicle republished the Round Table comment in a brief squib, “Recognized,” on October 18. The next day Clemens wrote Orion and Mollie, in an extraordinary letter, that he had at last resolved to “drop all trifling, & sighing after vain impossibilities, & strive for a fame—unworthy & evanescent though it must of necessity be.” He told Orion:

The letter is particularly significant because Clemens was again discouraged, as he had been in 1864, about his career. “Utterly miserable,” badly in debt, and believing “that there is a God for the rich man but none for the poor,” he promised “pistols or poison for one—exit me” if he could not reverse his luck within three months.70

There are several material signs that Clemens set to work in earnest at this time. “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog” was almost certainly [begin page 33] completed as part of this renewed campaign,71 and he submitted “The Great Earthquake in San Francisco” (no. 123) to the prestigious New York Weekly Review, which published it on November 25. Moreover, as Clemens told Orion and Mollie, he would begin “next week” to work for the San Francisco Dramatic Chronicle (“$40 a month for dramatic criticisms”), in addition to his daily Enterprise letter, in an effort to pay off his debt.72 On October 17 the Chronicle published his brief “Earthquake Almanac” (no. 122). Over the next few weeks it also published a number of unsigned commentaries on various topics (see Appendix B in volume 2), and his contributions to the column “Amusements,” which contained the theater notices. Beyond this, in November and December Mark Twain published three letters in the Napa County Reporter. These contained some news, and three sketches reprinted here: “The Guard on a Bender” (no. 138), “Benkert Cometh!” (no. 139), and “Webb's Benefit” (no. 141).

The notice in the Round Table and then the enormous success of the “Jumping Frog” story called forth a great deal of public comment. In a letter dated 1 November 1865, Charles Henry Webb wrote the Sacramento Union:

The hallmarks of Clemens' colloquial humor—“she didn't keep up her lick” and “they shoved”—were frequently noticed in the press,74 and to one Nevada journalist his humor seemed a “blaze of fun” [begin page 34] compared with which “ ‘Artemus Ward's’ slight gleam is as a farthing rushlight to the sun.”75 On December 10 Podgers (Richard L. Ogden) wrote from New York in his regular letter to the San Francisco Alta California:

In late January 1866 a colleague on the Chronicle affirmed that “ ‘Mark’ is bound to have a biographer one of these days—may it be a hundred years hence!”77

On January 20 Clemens could boast to his family that he was “generally placed at the head of my breed of scribblers in this part of the country.”78 Clearly aware of his mounting reputation, and determined to capitalize on his new eastern fame, he soon published more sketches in the Weekly Review and the Saturday Press: “An Open Letter to the American People” (no. 181) on February 17, “The Mysterious Bottle of Whiskey” (no. 186) on March 3, and “A Strange Dream” (no. 189) on June 2. By the end of 1866 the Saturday Press had published three major sketches, and the Weekly Review had printed (or reprinted) eight.

The sudden swell of popularity, especially in the East, persuaded Clemens to consider or reconsider plans for various kinds of books. On January 20 he told his family that Bret Harte had asked him to collaborate on a book of sketches to be drawn from his Enterprise and Californian contributions. The two men also contemplated writing a burlesque of “a book of poems which the publisher, Bancroft, is to issue in the spring. We know all the tribe of California poets, & understand their different styles,” he gloated, “& I think we can just make them get up & howl.” Neither project was ever completed, but [begin page 35] Clemens was entertaining still another idea at this time—what he called a “pet notion of mine”—a book of “about three hundred pages, and the last hundred will have to be written in St Louis, because the materials for them can only be got there.”79 The reference suggests an early concern with material that would eventually become “Old Times on the Mississippi” (1874–1875). This conjecture is reinforced by a report dated March 4 which appeared in the Unionville (Nev.) Humboldt Register. That paper's San Francisco correspondent had been talking with Mark Twain, who had told him “last night he would leave, in a few days, for the Sandwich Islands, in the employ of The Sacramento Union. Will be gone about two months. Then will go to Montana for same paper, and next Fall down the Missouri river in a Mackinac boat—he's an old Mississippi pilot—to New Orleans; where he intends writing a book.”80

Clemens did sail to the Sandwich Islands on March 6, employed by the Union to write “twenty or thirty letters”81 in a month-long visit. The excursion eventually lasted five months and produced twenty-five travel letters—and what is most important, still more material suitable for a book. When Clemens returned to California in August 1866 the editors of the Californian publicly urged him to revise and collect his Sandwich Island letters into a book: their “intrinsic interest and value” would make the book “both a literary and a pecuniary success.”82 Clemens worked on this project in late 1866 and early 1867, and he must actually have submitted a completed manuscript to the New York publishers Dick and Fitzgerald before deciding to withdraw it: “It would be useless to publish it in these dull publishing times,” he rationalized to his family.83

Although none of these projects reached immediate fruition, Clemens' stay in California proved to be one of the most productive periods of his life. One year after he had made his resolve in the letter to Orion, a fully revitalized Clemens gave his first—and wholly triumphant—Sandwich Islands lecture at Maguire's Academy of [begin page 36] Music in San Francisco. One week later Bret Harte wrote, in a letter to the Springfield (Mass.) Republican, that Clemens' talent was so far superior to Artemus Ward's that it heralded “a new star rising in this western horizon.” Mark Twain's humor, Harte added, was “of the western character of ludicrous exaggeration and audacious statement, which perhaps is more thoroughly national and American than even the Yankee delineations of Lowell.” His faults were “crudeness, coarseness, and an occasional Panurge-like plainness of statement.” But his satirical power, his shrewdness, and his hatred of shams promised to “make his faculty serviceable to mankind. His talent is so well based that he can write seriously and well when he chooses, which is perhaps the best test of true humor.”84

Just as the Sandwich Islands letters provided a trial run for the forthcoming letters from the Quaker City, so Mark Twain's successful San Francisco lecture opened up an area of incalculable importance to his writing. Hastily arranged lecture tours into the interior of California and Nevada permitted him to experiment with techniques of oral storytelling, and they established his self-confidence as a public lecturer while reaffirming that Mark Twain was a distinct public figure. Five days after a final San Francisco lecture on December 10, Mark Twain sailed on the steamer America for New York City, serving as the special correspondent for the Alta, which expected him to circumnavigate the globe and return in triumph. The parting words of that paper, possibly written by his faithful supporter John McComb, were:

Clearly Clemens was considered a man of note in his profession, but more importantly one who would soon transcend journalism as an author of books.

One hundred twenty-five pieces written in California are collected in these volumes, almost twice as many as are preserved from the first thirteen years of Mark Twain's apprenticeship. The disparity is even greater when measured in sheer number of words. As a journalist in Nevada Clemens was employed by a single newspaper on which his main assignment was to write up local events. In California, by contrast, he was essentially a free-lance writer, barring the four months he spent on the Call and the two months he worked on the Chronicle. Although his daily correspondence for the Enterprise in 1865 and 1866 eventually became a chore, the newspaper letter form was flexible enough to permit extraordinary freedom in choice of subject and mode of expression. Thus Mark Twain's fundamental inclination toward literary tales and sketches based remotely on the facts was supported and encouraged by the conditions of his employment, and even by the periods of leisure that he enjoyed in the mining camps. The need to earn a living by journalism, by keeping him in touch with events, affected the form and the content of all his work—scarcely a single piece does not derive from some news event, however trivial—but his relative freedom from the more confining type of journalism gave his imagination the working room it required.

It is hardly possible to give an adequate characterization of so many diverse sketches—but it may be noted that Clemens continued to indulge in the running newspaper “feud,” this time with Fitz Smythe (Albert S. Evans); that he showed an exuberantly antiromantic taste for satire and burlesque, finding an enormous number of forms and styles to parody; and finally that he experimented consciously and with great inventiveness with the various poses he took as Mark Twain, as well as with an alternative technique of some [begin page 38] importance—using a figure like Mother Utterback, Coon, or Simon Wheeler to give the narrative in full vernacular. From the standpoint of his reputation, as well as from that of his skills as a writer, the California period was enormously rewarding.

4. The Midwest and East: 1866–1871. We have already traced Mark Twain's interest in writing a book from as early as September 1864 up through the first months of 1866—an interest that blossomed when his reputation grew and when the various forms open to him (extended parody, sketch books, travel narrative) multiplied. In the five years between his departure from San Francisco and his move to Hartford in October 1871, Clemens published three books and planned several more. The Sandwich Islands book was completed but set aside as unpublishable in early 1867; The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, And other Sketches (1867) was published in collaboration with his California colleague Charles Henry Webb; The Innocents Abroad, which was based on the Quaker City letters, took almost two years to write and publish, but when it finally appeared in mid-1869 was a phenomenal best seller that soon established the author's national and international reputation; finally, Mark Twain's (Burlesque) Autobiography and First Romance, a slight pamphlet of little significance, appeared in March 1871.

The story of Clemens' efforts to publish books, especially sketch books, is fully treated in the textual introduction to this collection. What needs to be stressed here is that the energy which went into these projects, especially Innocents, naturally had a corresponding negative effect on his production of brief sketches. Only thirty-five items in the present collection were written between the time of his arrival in New York in January 1867 and the completion of Innocents in July 1869: his travel correspondence with half a dozen papers, his various lecture tours, and his courtship and marriage, not to mention the extensive job of redacting his Alta California and Tribune letters for the book, all combined to minimize the production of short works. Following the publication of Innocents, however, he would assume a new role as editor of the Buffalo Express (August 1869), and within eight months he would also contract with the Galaxy for a monthly column, “Memoranda,” into which he planned to funnel various [begin page 39] short works. Of the one hundred sixty-five items included in this portion of the collection, forty-eight first appeared in the Express, sixty-seven in the Galaxy, and thirty-two in a variety of other journals; eighteen additional selections, some of them intended for the Express or Galaxy, he left unpublished. They are collected here for the first time.

Clemens arrived in New York on 12 January 1867. He promptly began to work with Webb on the Jumping Frog book, and perhaps tinkered with the Sandwich Islands manuscript, while he also contributed at least one letter a week to the Alta. Late in February he must have reached an agreement with the New York Sunday Mercury, the paper that had accepted “Those Blasted Children” (no. 72) in February 1864: on March 3 the Mercury published “The Winner of the Medal” (no. 203), the first of seven articles by Mark Twain which would appear there in early 1867. Also in March the paper published “A Curtain Lecture Concerning Skating” (no. 204) and “Barbarous” (no. 207).

Clemens must have written these pieces in February and early March, since he left for St. Louis by train on March 3 to visit his family—the first time he had seen them in six years. While in the Midwest he lectured twice in St. Louis and, in early April, in Hannibal, Keokuk, and Quincy. In mid-March he published a series of three comic articles on female suffrage in the Missouri Democrat and, somewhat later, advertised his St. Louis and Quincy lectures by two elaborately devised newspaper pieces: “Explanatory” (no. 206) and “Mark Twain and John Smith” (no. 208). Despite these uninspired efforts, he seems to have been stimulated by his return to boyhood haunts, for he produced two sketches for the Mercury which drew directly or indirectly on that energy: “Jim Wolf and the Tom-Cats” (no. 212) and “A Reminiscence of Artemus Ward” (no. 211), the former being a boyhood memory narrated through Simon Wheeler. Both tales appeared in July, after he had sailed on the Quaker City in early June.

Clemens returned from St. Louis to New York in mid-April, made final arrangements for his Quaker City voyage, saw Webb bring out the Jumping Frog book, and lectured three times before large audiences. The lectures were popular but not financial successes, and the Jumping Frog book failed to sell as expected. Nevertheless, Clemens' [begin page 40] reception by influential easterners continued to be encouraging, as he had recently suggested in a letter to his family: “James Russell Lowell (‘Hosea Biglow,’) says the Jumping Frog is the finest piece of humorous writing ever produced in America.”86 Three weeks later Clemens' new friend Edward H. House, who worked on the New York Tribune as a drama critic, published a lecture review which Clemens later praised and which shows us how New York perceived this newcomer. House recalled Clemens' “Jumping Frog” tale in the Saturday Press as a sketch

Despite this warm reception, Clemens declined to lecture again, pleading his journalistic commitments: “I am one magazine article & eighteen letters behindhand (18 days to do them in, before sailing.)” By June 1 he was “wild with impatience to move—move—move!”88 And on June 8, in possession of a sound reputation of modest dimensions, this writer of “light humorous literature” sailed for the Holy Land under contract to correspond for the Alta California and the New York Tribune. He did not return to New York until November 19.

In August Clemens agreed to become Senator William M. Stewart's private secretary. Two days after disembarking at New York he was on his way to Washington, D.C., to take up his new duties, hoping to make the position “one of the best paying berths in Washington” and eventually to secure a government job for Orion.89 December 1867 through January and February 1868 was an extraordinarily busy period for him. Besides working for Senator Stewart (an arrangement that did [begin page 41] not long endure) he may have served briefly as a clerk to a Senate committee, and he maintained an enormous variety of newspaper correspondence. He was a member of the New York Tribune Washington staff—an “occasional”—and he wrote regular letters to the Alta California, the Enterprise, the Chicago Republican, and possibly the New York Herald.90 Clemens recalled many years later, moreover, that he and William Swinton worked together at this time on “the old original first Newspaper Syndicate on the planet. . . . We had twelve journals on our list; they were all weeklies, all obscure and poor and all scattered far away among the back settlements. . . . Each of the twelve took two letters a week from us, at a dollar per letter; each of us wrote one letter per week and sent off six duplicates of it to these benefactors.”91 Although most of his regular letters written at this time for the daily newspapers mentioned above will be collected in other volumes of The Works of Mark Twain, the present collection prints several items that either appeared in or were probably designed to appear in the “syndicate” of weeklies: “General Spinner as a Religious Enthusiast” (no. 222), “Mr. Brown, the Sergeant-at-Arms of the Senate” (no. 214), and “Interview with Gen. Grant” (no. 215).

While pursuing an active career as a journalist Mark Twain also became convinced that the influence of Senator John Conness of California and Justice Stephen J. Field could secure his appointment as San Francisco postmaster, and he was momentarily tempted to return to the West Coast in that capacity. He eventually decided against it. In fact, Clemens was at this time routinely turning down invitations to lecture at $100 a night, and he rejected his friend Frank Fuller's insistent pleas to launch a lecture tour in the provinces. To his family he confided: “Am pretty well known, now—intend to be better known. Am hob-nobbing with these old Generals & Senators & other humbugs for no good purpose.”92 His purpose was, in fact, to build a reputation “that shall stand fire” and then to “make a bran new start in the lecturing business, & I don't mean to do it in Tuttletown, Ark., or Baldwinsville, Michigan, either.”93 But by December 10 he was writing a lecture, having become convinced that he was al- [begin page 42] ready better known than he had thought. To Fuller he admitted, “I should be tempted to receive proposals from Young Men's Christian Ass.'s & such like. Because I am already tired of being in one place so long.”94 Nevertheless, he spoke first in Washington, D.C., on January 9. His lecture, billed as “The Frozen Truth,” was his first on the Holy Land excursion. Three days later, praised as “the distinguished humorist,”95 he gave his famous mock eulogy on women (“Woman—An Opinion,” no. 218) before the Washington Correspondents' Club and happily wrote home that Speaker Schuyler Colfax said it “was the best dinner-table speech he ever heard at a banquet.”96 A profitable lecture tour into “the provinces” now became a distinct possibility.

But two powerful inducements temporarily kept him in the East close to his home base. “Charlie Langdon's sister . . . (beautiful girl,)”97 was one: he had met her in late December 1867 and on New Year's Eve had escorted her to a public reading by Charles Dickens. The other inducement was his book, then tentatively called “The New Pilgrim's Progress.” As early as December 2 he reported to Mrs. Fairbanks that he had received “several propositions from the book publishers” for a volume about the Quaker City trip, and it now seems obvious that long before he embarked in June he fully understood the potential for embodying his account of the voyage in a book. He told Mrs. Fairbanks that he liked the proposal from the American Publishing Company at Hartford “much the best,”98 and he wrote to Elisha Bliss the same day, asking in detail what was required and what would be offered in return. But Bliss was slow to respond, and not especially forthcoming about his terms, so Clemens took matters in hand and went to see him. “This great American Publishing Company,” he told his family on January 24, “kept on trying to bargain with me for a book till I thought I would cut the matter short by coming up for a talk.”99 The matter was settled to his satisfaction, and he returned to his heavy newspaper duties in Washington.

His first impulse was to maintain this extensive correspondence while also writing the book: “I shall write to the Enterprise & Alta [begin page 43] every week, as usual, I guess, & to the Herald twice a week—occasionally to the Tribune & the magazines (I have a stupid article in the Galaxy, just issued), but I am not going to write to this, that & the other paper any more.”100 But these ambitious plans were soon abandoned, and he asked Bliss for a $1,000 advance, cut back severely on his correspondence, and began steadily turning out book manuscript.

Yet having made this step toward the life of an author and away from that of a journalist, Clemens was no longer tied to the East Coast. And when he learned that the Alta was planning to republish his letters on their own, he seized the opportunity to return to San Francisco, leaving on March 12 and arriving on April 2. “A business call in any given direction is a most comfortable thing when your inclinations call you powerfully in the self same direction,” he explained.101 He was welcomed by the Call as “the world-wide known ‘Mark Twain’ ” but “still the same old ‘Mark.’ ”102 He lectured in San Francisco on April 14 and 15, then for the remainder of the month toured the interior, lecturing from Sacramento to Carson City. Everywhere he was welcomed back with great enthusiasm and some ceremony. Conrad Wiegand, a Virginia City assayer, presented him on April 28 with a polished silver brick bearing the inscription “Mark Twain—Matthew v; 41—Pilgrim,” alluding to the verse “And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain.”103

Early in May he returned to San Francisco where, after some debate, John McComb and Frederick McCrellish of the Alta soon granted him exclusive rights to his printed letters. On May 5 he wrote Bliss from his favorite San Francisco hotel, the Occidental, “I am steadily at work.”104 For the better part of two months he diligently revised his letters and added material to his copy, which he submitted to Harte for suggestions. Despite this heavy work schedule he found time for social activity, and his very presence in San Francisco continued to make news. The Dramatic Chronicle reported his meeting with Charles Warren Stoddard, James F. Bowman, and Prentice Mulford [begin page 44] “with the view of improving the tone of his morals and if possible, shaking off the prejudices against orthodoxy, acquired by reason of the enforced contact and consequent martyrdom while in the company of his fellow pilgrims to Jerusalem.”105 On May 17, the very day the Alta published his last Quaker City letter, he attended a Baptist church and simmered while the minister, unaware of his presence, excoriated at some length “the letters of this person, Mark Twain, who visits the Holy Land and ridicules sacred scenes and things. The letters are sought after and eagerly read, because of his puerile attempts at wit, and miserable puns upon subjects which are dear to every Christian heart.”106 Loftily Clemens dismissed all such incidents: “It is only the small-fry ministers who assail me.”107 The Chronicle was particularly disposed to champion his work. Even before he returned to San Francisco it had linked his writing with that of Oliver Wendell Holmes108 and had defended his Quaker City letters against the strictures of Calvin B. McDonald, formerly the “triple-thunderer” of the San Francisco American Flag. McDonald had characterized the letters as the “disgusting literary truck” of a “mountebank grimmacing and gyrating through a country which the whole world of civilization regard[s] as classic, sublime and holy.”109 Such reactions were the inevitable penalty for bringing his humor into a larger public context than that of Virginia City or even San Francisco. Although Mark Twain claimed to be indifferent to them, we now know that he wrote at least one manuscript—“I Rise to a Question of Privilege” (no. 227)—designed to respond humorously to charges of irreverence. In “Remarkable Sagacity of a Cat” (no. 228) he also seems to have experimented briefly with western material that would prove productive indeed within a year; the sketch was written in June 1868 but would remain unpublished until he prepared a fuller version for his “Around the World” letters in December 1869. The preparation of The Innocents Abroad clearly took most of his time. With the manuscript completed, Clemens gave a farewell lecture on July 2 and sailed from San Francisco on July 6, arriving in New York [begin page 45] on July 29. The months of transition that saw him change from a senator's secretary to an author engrossed with his first major book are noticeably barren of short imaginative pieces.

During the year following his return to New York City from San Francisco Clemens distributed his time among three projects: the manuscript and proofs of Innocents, his courtship of Olivia Langdon, and a rigorous schedule of lectures in the Midwest and East which lasted from 17 November 1868 through 3 March 1869. This extraordinarily successful tour demonstrated his stamina and his drawing power on the platform, where he took rank as the most popular American humorist of the day. But of more immediate concern to Clemens was his ability to earn a steady living at some respectable profession. In fact, to make his marriage to Olivia more acceptable, he felt that he should “get located in a newspaper in a way to suit me.”110 What he had in mind was partial ownership and partial editorial control of an urban, eastern journal—a natural step to someone who had spent the last eight years as a fully professional but itinerant journalist. “I want to be permanent,” he wrote, “I must feel thoroughly & completely satisfied when I anchor ‘for good & all.’ ”111

Among the several alternatives that Clemens considered was to accept the post of political editor on the Cleveland Herald. But the terms Abel W. Fairbanks offered proved unsatisfactory, and he eventually declined the job. To Mrs. Fairbanks he explained, “It just offered another apprenticeship—another one, to be tacked on to the tail end of a foolish life made up of apprenticeships.”112 Shortly before August 12, relying on funds borrowed from his fiancée's father, Clemens purchased a one-third interest in the Buffalo Express from Thomas A. Kennett for $25,000. To Bliss he wrote, “It is an exceedingly thriving newspaper. We propose to make it more so.”113 Soon his hope was “to make this newspaper support me hereafter,”114 thus avoiding the necessity of lecturing. The choice of the Express was a sound one: it is doubtful whether he could have been his own man on the Cleveland Herald to the extent that he could on the Express. [begin page 46] He formally assumed his position on August 14, by which time he had also seen the first copies of Innocents.

The year had afforded him little opportunity for short newspaper or magazine work. In late 1868 he had published “Cannibalism in the Cars” (no. 232)—his first publication in an English journal; he had written “A Mystery” (no. 233), published in the Cleveland Herald; “A Wicked Fraud” (no. 234) had appeared in a New Jersey paper; and he had written three sketches for Packard's Monthly, two of them reprinted in this collection: “Mark Twain's Eulogy on the ‘Reliable Contraband’ ” (no. 235) and “Personal Habits of the Siamese Twins” (no. 237). On 4 June 1869, speaking as a literary journalist and characteristically stressing his “idleness,” Clemens noted that the number of his current publications had drastically fallen off because of his preoccupation with Olivia, his lectures, and his book: “In twelve months (or rather I believe it is fourteen,) I have earned just eighty dollars by my pen—two little magazine squibs & one newspaper letter—altogether the idlest, laziest 14 months I ever spent in my life.”115 So spoke the man who was still in the midst of one of the most demanding years of his life. He would soon admit, “When I got to counting up the irons I had in the fire (marriage, editing a newspaper, and lecturing,) I said it was most too many, for the subscriber.”116

Albert Bigelow Paine characterized Clemens' responsibility on the Buffalo Express as that of “a sort of general and contributing editor, with a more or less ‘roving commission’—his hours and duties not very clearly defined.” It was expected, Paine added, that Mark Twain's “connection with the paper would give it prestige and circulation.”117 Clemens soon established the pattern for his major contributions to the paper: a featured article each Saturday. With few exceptions he observed that schedule from 21 August 1869 through 29 January 1870, immediately before his marriage on February 2. No Saturday features appeared in February; he wrote Bliss on February 23, “I don't go near the Express office more than twice a week—& then only for an hour. I am just as good as other men—& other men take honey-moons I [begin page 47] reckon.”118 After this his interest in writing for the paper declined: in the next three months (March through May) only five featured articles appeared in the Express, and thereafter only four, the final one coming on 17 September 1870 (“Fortifications of Paris,” no. 323).

In addition to his Saturday features, Clemens also compiled the daily column “People and Things” from 17 August until 27 September 1869, when he wrote to Bliss: “I like newspapering very well, as far as I have got—but I adjourn, a week hence, to commence preparing my lecture, & shall not be here again till the middle of February. After a few days, now, I shall be in Elmira till Nov. 1. Recollect.”119 While on tour in New England and New York from 1 November 1869 to 21 January 1870 Clemens presumably mailed his weekly features to the Express, but he found it impractical to continue “People and Things.” This column was a miscellany of comments—breezy, skeptical, or merely comic, ranging from single sentences to miniature essays—on news events and oddities evidently gleaned from the newspaper exchanges. Clemens had always been attracted by the endless procession of “extraordinary but true” items so amply furnished by the newspapers, and although he occasionally found material here for sketches, his tenure on the “People and Things” column shows that he welcomed the opportunity to wisecrack at will, to pass judgment whimsically or severely on the most ephemeral matters. His comments were usually brief, epigrams really, and they remind us that he would return in the 1890s to writing Pudd'nhead Wilson's maxims. At the same time, some of the longer items look back to his experiments in the local columns of the Enterprise and the Call. Some samples from the column of August 18 follow:

—A pig with a human head is astonishing South Carolina. Are they rare, there?

—A Wisconsin girl has swallowed forty percussion caps and is afraid to sit down.

. . . .

—A human skull, wrapped up in a piece of brown paper along with a brick, has been found in a marsh near Milwaukee. The proprietor [begin page 48] can recover it by applying to the Milwaukee authorities. It will not be easy to identify it, because so many like it have been lost—it was empty.

. . . .

This collection reprints thirteen items from “People and Things,” all of them paragraphs of more than usual length and development.121

A week after Clemens began his winter lecture tour of 1869–1870 he told his sister, Pamela, “They flood me with high-priced invitations to write for magazines and papers, and publishers besiege me to write books. Can't do any of these things.”122 Nevertheless, by January he had decided to write another book, was planning to bring out a new collection of sketches, and was thinking about his “Noah's Ark book,” which would, he said, “be several years” in completion.123 Later that year he began to get excited about a collaboration with J. H. Riley—a book about the South African diamond mines which was intended to “sweep the world like a besom of destruction.”124

The overriding concern of this period turned out to be “the big California & Plains book.”125 In the Express for 16 October 1869 Clemens had published the first of his “Around the World” letters, six of which gave highlights of his Nevada and California days. Later sketches in the Galaxy also reverted to his western experiences, and on 15 July 1870 he and Bliss signed the contract for Roughing It. Certainly it is not surprising that with all these projects on hand his contributions to the Express tapered off. In a March 1870 letter to Olivia's parents he said, “I shall write one or two sketches a month for [begin page 49] the Express, & I have an idea that for a good while I shall do nothing else on the paper.”126

Early in March 1870 Clemens was approached by the proprietors of the Galaxy magazine to write a monthly column. On March 11 he wrote Bliss:

Apparently his offer was accepted, and the Galaxy “Memoranda” column became a major preoccupation for the rest of the year. William C. and Francis P. Church, the owners of the Galaxy, were trying to make it the leading literary journal of the middle Atlantic seaboard. They paid well for such writers as Henry James, Whitman, Trollope, and De Forest. On March 26 Clemens reported that he had signed the contract: “The berth is exceedingly easy & the salary liberal.”128 From May 1870 through April 1871, with the notable exception of two months when family troubles forced him to limit his contribution to a single sketch, Clemens packed his ten-page installments with fun making and satire, ranging in length from brief anecdotes to sustained sketches and tales.

Like all of his work at this time, the Galaxy pieces were written under the strain imposed by the illness and subsequent death of his wife's father on August 6, the death of Olivia's friend Emma Nye in the Clemens home on September 29, and the continuing illness of Olivia herself following the birth of their first child on November 7. Through all these domestic afflictions Clemens persisted as best he could. At first he valued the freedom and the prestige afforded by his Galaxy assignment. Soon, however, he found himself in “a terrible [begin page 50] whirl with Galaxy & book work,”129 the more so as the pressure to finish Roughing It increased. By mid-January 1871 he had decided to “draw out of the Galaxy with the April No. & write no more for any periodical—except, at long intervals a screed that I happened to dearly want to write.”130 Two months later, when Orion and Bliss were pressing him for contributions to Bliss's trade magazine, the American Publisher, they elicited the following emphatic declaration: “There isn't money enough between hell & Hartford to hire me to write once a month for any periodical.”131 This aversion coincided with a growing distaste for Buffalo (and presumably for his work on the Express). On March 3 he told Riley, “I have come at last to loathe Buffalo so bitterly (always hated it) that yesterday I advertised our dwelling house for sale, & the man that comes forward & pays us what it cost a year ago, ($25,000,) can take it. . . . I offer the Express for sale also, & the man that will pay me $10,000 less than I gave can take that.” After reiterating his determination to “write no more for any periodical,” he added: “Shall simply write books.”132 On March 18, with Olivia “on a mattrass,”133 he moved his family to Elmira, leaving their Buffalo residence for the last time.

Roughing It would soon become Mark Twain's sole literary preoccupation: he himself realized that he had come to the end of twenty years of apprenticeship. In his penultimate contribution to the Galaxy (April 1871) he published “My First Literary Venture” (no. 357), justifying the sketch with these words: “As I shall write but little for periodicals hereafter, it seems to fit in with a sort of inoffensive appropriateness here, since it is a record of the first scribbling for any sort of periodical I ever had the temerity to attempt.”134 To be sure, Bliss coaxed a few sketches from him in July and September 1871 for the American Publisher, but these were chiefly to gain advertising for Roughing It.

Like his work in California periodicals, many of Clemens' tales and sketches in the Express and the Galaxy were topical, their kernel found in the daily telegraphic news summaries and the newspaper [begin page 51] exchanges. “A Comfortable Day's Work” (no. 250), for instance, embellished a newspaper item about the discovery of a large gold nugget in California. As he wrote to Olivia, he valued such components of his “People and Things” column because “they are excellent, as texts to string out a sketch from.”135 Similarly, many of his imaginative items in the Galaxy arose from his editorial reading: “The Judge's ‘Spirited Woman’ ” (no. 300) derived from reports of the trial of Prince Pierre Napoleon Bonaparte. And “Human Nature” (no. 297) arose from an editorial in the Toronto Globe about a contemporary disaster at sea. Occasionally the topical element entered his imaginative construction in a more tangential way: “The Legend of the Capitoline Venus” (no. 272) is a “condensed novel” that grew out of rumors of the Cardiff Giant hoax, the author's memories of Rome from his Quaker City voyage, and deeply repressed feelings about his courtship of Olivia Langdon.

The Express and the Galaxy gave Clemens a forum in which to exercise his talents freely, whether he wished to comment tartly on a news event or write an extravagant burlesque. As a proprietor of the Express and sole editor of “Memoranda,” Clemens enjoyed a degree of freedom greater than any he had achieved as a contributor to the Californian or even the Enterprise. When he signed on with the Galaxy he told Mrs. Fairbanks:

He paid tribute to such friends as J. H. Riley and Henry Ward Beecher, and he obviously felt free to follow his satiric impulses—to attack the treatment of the Chinese in America (“Goldsmith's Friend Abroad Again,” no. 326), for instance—something that had been forbidden to him on the Call. He castigated “The Meanest Railroad” (no. 242), and he ridiculed the reasoning of paleontologists (“A Brace of Brief Lectures on Science,” no. 362) no less vigorously than he satirized [begin page 52] romantic ideas about the American Indian (“The Noble Red Man,” no. 320). His contributions elicited letters of praise from many readers, including one who called him “a national benefactor,”137 and another who deplored “the stilted sentiment of the time” that had stifled all humor “excepting Mr. Dickens' works . . . until your appearance in the Galaxy.”138

Even this apparent freedom soon became hateful to Clemens, for although he was more or less unfettered in what he chose to write, he was obliged to write regularly and to meet weekly and monthly deadlines. Especially when these duties came in conflict with his desire to finish Roughing It, he rebelled and eventually cast off the obligations completely. Moreover, a number of sketches reprinted in these volumes indicate that he was growing dissatisfied with the institution of journalism itself. “A Protest” and “A Wail” (nos. 282 and 283), “The Editorial Office Bore” (no. 312), and “The ‘Present’ Nuisance” (no. 339) were all about various difficulties connected with his editorial role on the Express, and although he exaggerated for the sake of humor, the real abuses clearly rankled. A more serious matter was the way newspapers generated and perpetuated myths, which he attacked in “General Washington's Negro Body-Servant” and “Interviewing the Interviewer” (nos. 220 and 277). In other sketches he ridiculed the newspapers' confusion (“Where Governor Hoffman Is,” no. 251), their inflamed rhetoric (“Journalism in Tennessee,” no. 252), and their sensationalism (“The ‘Wild Man’ ‘Interviewed,’ ” no. 259). His attitude was generally one of impatience with the profession and seems to reflect his ambition to rise above it.

On the other hand, much of what he wrote for the Express and Galaxy formed a valuable part of his apprentice work, and some of it survived to be incorporated into Sketches, New and Old and even Roughing It. He continued to develop a literary repertoire of extraordinary range: from the anecdote to the sustained humorous narrative, from the miniature essay to the ambitious set piece, and from explosive denunciations of specific abuses to burlesques of popular literary and journalistic forms as different as medieval romances and newspaper interviews. He also continued to experiment with various [begin page 53] poses for the character Mark Twain: the naive, romantic inquirer (“A Day at Niagara,” no. 241); the sly poultry thief (“More Distinction,” no. 307); and especially the hapless victim—whether of celebrating Englishmen, a lightning rod salesman, a barber, or a watch mechanism and the technicians who professed to regulate it. He experimented freely with other narrators too, such as the judge in “The Judge's ‘Spirited Woman’ ” (no. 300) and the undertaker in “A Reminiscence of the Back Settlements” (no. 331). In several sketches he began to create a kind of comic mythology of his own childhood and to probe his immediate past in the West. He touched on several themes that would occupy his later work: intellectual pretentiousness, callousness toward one's fellow man, pride rooted in family or status, the problem of identity, and the uses of the vernacular character.

5. “The Artifice of . . . Partial Incoherence.” On 19 October 1875 William Dean Howells wrote to Clemens about his forthcoming review of Sketches, New and Old: “You can imagine the difficulty of noticing a book of short sketches,” he apologized, “it's like noticing a library.”139 The 365 items collected in these volumes do indeed constitute a kind of library—one that records the humorist's development over a period of twenty years—and it is a library of immense variety that resists simple characterization. In part this difficulty arises from the sheer volume of Clemens' apprentice work. If, in addition to the pieces printed or reprinted here, one counts his early social and political commentary; his early theatrical, art, and literary criticism; his legislative reports in Nevada; his unsigned local news items and general commentary for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, the San Francisco Morning Call, and the San Francisco Dramatic Chronicle; his many travel letters, notably to the Sacramento Union and the San Francisco Alta California; his out-of-town correspondence to the Enterprise, the Chicago Republican, New York Tribune, and New York Herald; and the squibs to be found in the Hannibal Journal “Our Assistant's Column” and in the Buffalo Express “People and Things” as well as the brief items in the Galaxy's “Memoranda,” the sheer number of words is staggering, and the number of separate [begin page 54] pieces easily three or four thousand. Clearly, before 1871 Clemens found ample opportunity to indulge his well-known preference for the short forms and to experiment with them.

From first to last the apprentice writer was intimately involved with nineteenth-century journalism in a variety of capacities. He was typesetter, local reporter, out-of-town correspondent, free-lance and feature writer, contributing editor to the Galaxy, and owner-editor of the Buffalo Express. The compiler of “People and Things” on the Express read the exchanges as regularly as “Our Assistant Editor” had done many years earlier on the Hannibal Journal; and in those exchanges Clemens found basic models for the short forms he practiced and developed—and also burlesqued, taking aim, it sometimes seems, at every conceivable target. Whether he wrote an account of his descent into the Spanish mine for the Enterprise, a burlesque “Answers to Correspondents” for the Californian, an epigram for “People and Things,” or a mellow reminiscence for the Galaxy, his writing reveals a thorough familiarity with the preferred modes of nineteenth-century journalism and a readiness to appropriate all its resources. His approach was radically eclectic.

So was his imagination, which ranged widely to invent new and quite idiosyncratic forms of humorous expression, as may readily be seen even in his simplest local items. He freely combined disparate or incongruous elements to produce sketches that were entirely unpredictable—true originals. “Bob Roach's Plan for Circumventing a Democrat” (no. 124), for instance, somehow merges details of San Francisco election returns, a Mississippi River memory recast as a yarn, and oblique political satire into a thoroughly delightful but pointed whimsy. Similarly, when Clemens adopted the daily or weekly newspaper letter as a mode of expression, he followed the accepted custom of mingling news with gossipy commentary, but he improved upon this mode by introducing an informal chronicle of his own doings and thoughts—a kind of rambling personal narrative—and by incorporating brief tales, miniature essays, fantasies, burlesques, scathing denunciations, or any of these in combination.

Throughout his apprenticeship, in fact, Clemens deliberately mixed literary impulses with his journalistic tasks, and this was an unfailing source of novelty leading to unique effects and even entire sketches that still defy categorization except under the term of “humor.” For [begin page 55] example, an early Californian piece, “Whereas” (no. 94), joins a genteel, essaylike reflection on love with an extravagantly cynical burlesque of sentimental conventions. In “An Unbiased Criticism” (no. 100) a casually introduced parenthetical aside blossoms into a brilliant comic monologue by Simon Wheeler, and in the “biography” of “City Marshal Perry” (no. 49) the author's free association takes over and engulfs the rhetorical pattern that the reader has been led to expect. Such techniques remind us of Clemens' reliance on the appeal of variety, and they typically produce a coherence less formal than personal. At times the autobiographical impulse in this early work—whether it reflects Clemens' own character or one of his quirky alter egos—may so fully inform the piece that it seems to be governed only by unpredictable whim, sheer gaiety, or critical animus.

Clemens' better short works exert a special fascination, not only because when read in chronological order they demonstrate his considerable growth in craft, but also because they tell us a great deal about his rather mysterious and unpredictable mind. Their artistry lies—as his best readers have always felt—in the seeming ease with which he imposes fiction on reality, shapes incongruities into a unique coherence, or generates an indescribable effect, “doubling and turning upon itself” as Howells noted, “till you wonder why Mr. Clemens has ever been left out of the list of our subtile humorists.”140 Many of Clemens' best efforts resemble a one-man jam session in which he improvises dazzling solo performances on all the instruments.

This effect is pervasive in his tales, his sketches, and his oral performances. It was well recognized by his contemporaries as a characteristic of the man himself. Calvin Higbie, his Aurora mining partner, once described the way Clemens danced at a frontier ball:

In changing partners, whenever he saw a hand raised he would grasp it with great pleasure and sail off into another set, oblivious to his surroundings. Sometimes he would act as though there were no use in trying to go right or to dance like other people, and with his eyes closed he would do a hoe-down or a double-shuffle all alone, talking to himself and saying that he never dreamed there was so much pleasure to be obtained at a ball. It was all as natural as a child's play. By [begin page 56] the second set, all the ladies were falling over themselves to get him for a partner, and most of the crowd, too full of mirth to dance, were standing and sitting around, dying with laughter.141

Both Higbie and Paine were naive in thinking this sort of performance “as natural as a child's play,” although one may suspect that the art of appearing natural sprang from the deepest sources of Clemens' personality. Edward H. House, who reviewed Clemens' Sandwich Islands lecture in May 1867, was in some ways closer to the truth. House wrote of his technique at that time:

This talent for controlled incoherence was, as House recognized, a fundamental comic tool—one which Clemens cultivated throughout the literary apprenticeship and which came to its first full flower in The Innocents Abroad. Howells said of that book that “almost any topic, and any event of the author's past life, he finds pertinent to the story of European and Oriental travel, and if the reader finds it impertinent, he does not find it the less amusing. The effect is dependent in so great degree upon this continuous incoherence, that no chosen passage can illustrate the spirit of the whole.”143 It is in the light of Clemens' preoccupation with journalism and with developing this disarming comic technique that the early short works are best appreciated. These interests led Clemens to disregard most traditional genres—except to burlesque them—and they made his work difficult to categorize, even for contemporaries. His early work is almost always surprising and delightful—but it is also impossible to divide into neat and precise generic divisions. For an effective narrative from his pen might yield political implications, and an article aimed at exposing [begin page 57] social or journalistic abuse might employ an amusing literary sketch. Skillful analysis of plodding or humorless writing might balloon unexpectedly into fantasy, and of course the travel letter could always include anything and in any order. The selections collected in these volumes offer the chance to study that eclecticism, that growing technique in the earliest years of Mark Twain's development as a writer.

E.M.B.

September 1977

Miami University