This volume opens with Samuel Clemens’s first extant letter of 1867, an informal business proposal to Edward P. Hingston (Artemus Ward’s manager), written just three days after his arrival in New York from San Francisco, and concludes with a very personal letter to Olivia L. Langdon (soon to be his fiancée), written on the last day of 1868, in which Clemens looked back on a period of enormous personal change:

In the intervening two years, Clemens had taken the several decisive steps that would transform him from an itinerant journalist and lecturer, savoring his first fame, into an author on the threshold of achieving national celebrity, as well as acceptance into eastern affluent society. In the more than one hundred and fifty letters collected for the first time here—all that are known to survive from this period—Clemens set down the most detailed and candid account of this transformation that we are ever likely to have.

In December 1866 Clemens had sailed from San Francisco as an official traveling correspondent for the San Francisco Alta California, planning to proceed from New York eventually on a trip around the world. In the meantime he intended to lecture in several eastern cities, and also to publish a book about the Sandwich Islands, cobbled together from his recent dispatches to the Sacramento Union. Once in New York, he promptly fell in with members of its Bohemian community, chief among them his San Francisco friend Charles Henry Webb, who was well connected with eastern journals and a fledgling publisher himself. Webb in turn introduced Clemens to several other New York journalists, and to at least one New York publisher, George W. Carleton, who in the previous decade had published books by virtually every rising young American humorist. Early in February 1867 Carleton declined to publish a small collection of Mark Twain’s western journalism, and so the author turned to Webb, who agreed to edit and to publish what became his first book, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, And other Sketches, which made its appearance on about the first of May. Clemens also enlisted the support of another western friend, Frank Fuller, who volunteered to manage his New York lecture debut—a crucial event that was eventually planned to coincide with the publication of his book.

By the end of February Clemens had made another decision that would prove momentous. He recalled in 1910 that he “had long had a desire to travel and see the world, and now the platform had furnished me the means. So I joined the ‘Quaker City Excursion’” ( WIM , 462). This five-and-a-half-month chartered voyage to Europe and the Holy Land was organized by (and largely for) members of Henry Ward Beecher’s Plymouth Church in Brooklyn—and widely supposed to include Beecher himself. Clemens agreed with his employers to double his production of travel letters to two per week while the trip lasted, in return for the cost of his passage and some of his other expenses. The Quaker City set sail in June and returned to New York in late November 1867, but not before hostilities just short of open warfare had developed between Clemens and some of the more “respectable” passengers. “They will blow their horns about the thousand places they have visited and get the lockjaw three times a day trying to pronounce the names of them,” Clemens jeered in the Alta, “but never, never in the world, will they open the sealed book of the secret history of their memorable pilgrimage. And I won’t—for the present, at any rate” (SLC 1868c).

Instead, Clemens rejoined the world of professional journalism, this time in Washington, D.C., where he also served (nominally) as private secretary to Senator William M. Stewart of Nevada. Before even half of the Alta letters could be published, however, Clemens was approached by Elisha Bliss, Jr. (of the American Publishing Company, a subscription house in Hartford, Connecticut), who offered to publish a book based upon them. The result, published in mid-1869, was The Innocents Abroad: “being some account of the steamship Quaker City’s pleasure excursion to Europe and the Holy Land; with descriptions of countries, nations, incidents and adventures, as they appeared to the author”—or, in other words, a somewhat attenuated version of the “secret history” to which Mark Twain had provocatively alluded in the Alta. Its enormous success would secure for Elisha Bliss the role of Mark Twain’s publisher for the next ten years.

While some members of the Quaker City excursion unwittingly provided Mark Twain with a subject worthy of his powers, several others became his friends. Particularly important was Mary Mason Fairbanks, a well-educated and socially respectable matron from Cleveland, who clearly recognized Clemens’s talent. With his eager cooperation she became a literary and social mentor, encouraging him to be “funny without being vulgar” (p. 188). She also took in hand Charles J. Langdon, a youth of nineteen whom Clemens likewise befriended, and who introduced Clemens to his family—including his older sister Olivia—when they visited New York City later that year. More than seven months elapsed, however, before Clemens could take advantage of Charles’s invitation to visit the Langdons at their home in Elmira. During that time he became embroiled in a dispute with his Alta employers over the right to reuse his newspaper letters in the book. To secure their permission, he made a sudden business trip to California, where he also lectured again. Having reached a satisfactory agreement with the Alta, he remained briefly in California to finish the manuscript for his book, with the editorial help of his old friend Bret Harte. In July 1868 he departed San Francisco—for what would prove to be the last time—and was soon in Hartford, where he delivered his manuscript to Bliss.

In late August Clemens took the train to Elmira, where he fell precipitously in love with Olivia Langdon. He now began a long campaign, first to win her affection, then to prove himself worthy of it—which is to say, to earn the approval of her devoted and protective parents. The letters Clemens wrote almost daily to Olivia, beginning in September, mark an unmistakable change of voice. They are among the longest letters he ever wrote, much more intimate and self-examining than any that preceded them. In the end, however, they are perhaps best regarded simply as typical love letters. “Courtship lifts a young fellow far and away above his common earthly self,” Clemens wrote in 1899, “and by an impulse natural to those lofty regions he puts on his halo and his heavenly warpaint and plays archangel as if he were born to it. He is working a deception, but is not aware of it” ( WWD , 170). Clemens’s letters to Olivia in these initial months of their courtship document his efforts to rise to her level—to reform his rough habits, overcome his religious skepticism, and adopt a more conventional, self-consciously Christian way of life. He may well have been working a deception about his own character and beliefs—but it is impossible to read these letters without realizing that if he was, he was not aware of it at the time.

With the counsel of a new friend, the Reverend Joseph Twichell of Hartford, and the continuing support and guidance of Mrs. Fairbanks, Clemens soon prevailed with Olivia—but satisfying her family would take longer. The end of 1868 found the former “Wild Humorist of the Pacific Slope” touring eastern and midwestern towns and cities to lecture on “The American Vandal Abroad,” anticipating publication of his first major book, and longing for marriage and domesticity.