This volume opens on 6 January 1870, with Clemens on the final leg of the lecture tour he had begun in November 1869. Having fourteen lectures to deliver by 21 January, he was impatient to finish “the long agony” (p. 10) and prepare for his marriage on 2 February to Olivia Langdon. “I wouldn’t do another lecture season unless I were in absolute want, almost,” he wrote Olivia on 10 January (p. 15). Flush now with the continuing critical and commercial success of The Innocents Abroad, which was producing income averaging about $1,300 per month, and established as co-owner and co-editor of the Buffalo Express, Clemens looked forward to a settled life in Buffalo, in which he and Olivia—“a life companion who is part of me—part of my heart, & flesh & spirit”—would be together, “never more to part again in life” (pp. 18, 31). Nevertheless, before the end of 1871, when the volume closes, both Buffalo and the Express had been discarded and Clemens was once again far from Olivia and enduring the “eternity a lecture-season is” (p. 15). The 338 letters published here, the majority for the first time, document a tumultuous two years for Samuel and Olivia Clemens, a period in which the satisfactions of Clemens’s career and the gratifications of married life were nearly overwhelmed with “beetling Alps of trouble” (p. 363), frustration, and grief.

These letters capture Clemens’s irrepressibly restless and multi-faceted mind at work devising literary projects, lectures, business schemes, and his first patented invention (“Mark Twain’s Elastic Strap”). As his confidence in the profitability of the Buffalo Express and his creative commitment to it waned, he sought and found a broader readership by writing a well-received monthly “Memoranda” department for the Galaxy magazine, published two versions of his wildly popular burlesque war map, the “Fortifications of Paris,” and tried to capitalize further on his popularity by issuing a hastily prepared “pamphlet,” Mark Twain’s (Burlesque) Autobiography and First Romance, which proved a failure. Most importantly, inspired by the “booming” sales of Innocents, in late August 1870 he began writing a new book, Roughing It. And he found time to entertain a variety of other works that he abandoned or postponed, among them a proposed book about Washington, D.C. (possibly a precursor to The Gilded Age); a volume of sketches for the American Publishing Company (finally published in 1875 as Mark Twain’s Sketches, New and Old); a “Noah’s Ark book” that he returned to periodically thoughout his life without finishing; a pamphlet version of “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County”; a “humorous picture-book” for which he was to merely provide captions; and a book on the South African diamond mines, researched by proxy (his friend John Henry Riley), but never begun.

This professional ferment was more than matched in the personal sphere. A series of catastrophes and near catastrophes that commenced within six months of the Clemenses’ marriage profoundly altered both of their lives. In late June they were called to Elmira, New York, for the beginning of the death watch at the bedside of Jervis Langdon, that most generous father and father-in-law, which finally ended when he died of stomach cancer on 6 August. Before Olivia, then five months pregnant, could recover from that loss and the strain that preceded it, her visiting friend, Emma Nye, fell ill with typhoid fever, dying on 29 September in the Clemenses’ Buffalo bedroom. Following a near miscarriage in October, Olivia gave birth on 7 November to Langdon Clemens. This happy event was complicated by the baby’s prematurity and recurrent illnesses, and the Clemens house in Buffalo consequently was filled with doctors and a succession of day nurses, night nurses, and wet nurses. The baby’s persistent debility and Olivia’s progressive exhaustion, as she tried to care for him while managing the household, culminated in her succumbing to typhoid fever herself in early February 1871 and remaining near death for more than a month. Clemens, fearing for her life and “in a state of absolute frenzy” (p. 365), was unable to make needed progress on Roughing It. After ending his commitment to the Galaxy, he was forced to contend, furiously, with a new distraction, the demands of his brother, Orion, whom he had recommended as editor of his publisher’s house paper, the American Publisher, for regular contributions.

Associating Buffalo with the “infernal damnable chaos” of his life, by March 1871 Clemens had come to loathe the city “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” (pp. 337–38, 366). The next month, leaving Buffalo without selling the house, Jervis Langdon’s surprise wedding gift, the Clemenses settled in at the Langdon family home in Elmira, where they contemplated a permanent move to Hartford, Connecticut. In Elmira, Olivia’s health slowly improved and Clemens managed to establish a literary routine that enabled him to forge ahead on Roughing It. Before mid-June, determined to support his family with his own income, not with Olivia’s inheritance, and clearly impelled by past medical expenses, by the cost of living in Elmira while still maintaining the Buffalo house, and by the impending costs of the move to Hartford, Clemens began actively planning a lecture tour for the season of 1871–72, writing a series of possible lectures. In August he went to Hartford himself, to read proof of Roughing It, and then, in mid-October, having settled Olivia, now pregnant again, and Langdon in a rented house there, he took to the railways and the lecture platform once more. This tour was perhaps the most difficult of his career, chiefly because of his inability to write a lecture acceptable to a public that regarded him as the foremost humorist on the circuit. It was not until December, after nearly two months of frequently indifferent, and sometimes hostile, audiences and critics, that he discovered his best subject—“Roughing It,” drawn from his forthcoming book. But if his listeners warmed to him then, that was insufficient consolation to Olivia. On 3 December she wrote: “I can not and I WILL NOT think about your being away from me this way every year, it is not half living—if in order to sustain our present mode of living you are obliged to do that, then we will change our mode of living—” (p. 511, n. 2). And on 31 December, in the final letter in this volume, Clemens, responding to her longing with his own, advised her: “Be bright & happy—accept the inevitable with a brave heart, since grieving cannot mend it but only makes it the harder to bear, for both of us. All in good time we shall be together again—& then—!” (p. 530).

V.F.   M.B.F.