This volume opens on New Year’s Day 1874, with Clemens in London, nearing the end of his tremendously successful second English lecture engagement. After a month of delivering “Our Fellow Savages of the Sandwich Islands” and “Roughing It on the Silver Frontier” to packed houses in London, Leicester, and Liverpool, and having seen to publication of the English edition of The Gilded Age and gathered information for a planned book on England, Clemens keenly anticipated a home reunion with his wife and daughter. “I have a plan born of this separation,” he warned, however: “I mean to leave home for 48 hours, every month, so as to have the rich joy of getting back again constantly repeated” (p. 7). The 348 letters gathered here, more than half of them published for the first time, document in minute detail Clemens’s failure to adhere to that semifacetious plan—for 1874 and 1875 proved to be perhaps his least restless period to date. He generally stayed close to home, solidifying his position as author, family man, and public figure.

Once back in Hartford, with his wife’s forceful encouragement, Clemens finally made good on his oft-repeated vow to retire from the rigors of the lecture circuit. In early March 1874 he gave a Boston performance of “Roughing It” which apparently would be his last paid platform appearance for a decade. In part by way of replacing that steady, if exhausting, source of income he was soon engaged on a variety of literary projects that made him “the busiest white man in America—& much the happiest” (p. 47). These included the book on England, which, however, he abandoned early in 1874, and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, which he worked on in stages until its completion in July 1875. He assembled two collections of sketches, Mark Twain’s Sketches. Number One, an 1874 pamphlet suppressed because it violated the exclusivity clause of a standing contract with the American Publishing Company of Hartford, and Mark Twain’s Sketches, New and Old, a much more substantial collection issued by that firm in the fall of 1875. He also continued his practice of speaking out, in newspaper letters, on topics of the day, including the women’s temperance crusade that was sweeping the United States, the inadequacies of the American postal system, and America’s obligation to contribute to a memorial to Shakespeare in Stratford-upon-Avon.

Clemens’s stature as a literary artist soared in 1874 and 1875 when the Atlantic Monthly began to court him as a regular contributor. In November 1874 he published his first Atlantic article, a piece he described as having “no humor in it” and “rather out of my line” (p. 217). This was “A True Story, Repeated Word for Word as I Heard It,” a poignant retelling of an anecdote Clemens had recently heard from a former slave, now acknowledged to be a classic of its kind. Then, beginning in January 1875, he followed up with the original and much admired series of “Old Times on the Mississippi” sketches in which he re-created the steamboat life he had known as a pilot in 1857–61. His “arrival” as a member of the eastern literary establishment was signaled by his prominent and featured attendance at the Atlantic’s December 1874 anniversary dinner for its contributors, where he socialized with his increasingly close friends William Dean Howells and Thomas Bailey Aldrich, but also with Oliver Wendell Holmes and Henry James, among many others. He strengthened his connection to Aldrich with two letters in the spring of 1874, coaching him through the revision of a crucial chapter in his novel Prudence Palfrey. And he deepened his relationship with Howells with a stream of letters throughout 1874 and 1875 which made Howells his most regular correspondent as well as his most trusted literary critic and editor. Clemens’s confidence in his own writing and in his proficiency at the business of authorship is evident in his allusions to his own work and in the advice and assistance he offered not only to Aldrich and Howells, but also to Anna Dickinson, Louise Chandler Moulton, and his old western colleagues Charles H. Webb and William Wright (Dan De Quille).

Clemens’s most contemporaneously successful, and lucrative, literary work at this time was not in a book, magazine, or newspaper, but on the stage. As his letters establish, in the spring of 1874, after stopping the San Francisco production of an unauthorized dramatization of The Gilded Age, Clemens set the unfinished manuscript of Tom Sawyer aside in order to prepare his own play, which he completed in mid-July. After several tryout performances in upstate New York, it opened at the Park Theatre in New York City on 16 September, with veteran actor John T. Raymond (whose relationship with Clemens was always contentious) in the featured role of the irrepressible speculator, Colonel Mulberry Sellers. The play became a runaway hit with audiences, despite the imperfections that the critics were quick to point out—and that Clemens was equally quick to humorously concede. In its first three months in New York, it earned Clemens ten thousand dollars, a fraction of the total it paid him through regular tours and revivals over the next dozen years. For decades he tried in vain to write another play that would match its appeal.

The Gilded Age play helped keep Clemens’s name in the newspapers through much of 1874 and 1875. But even without it he was fodder for the gossip columns. His “pedestrian” excursion to Boston in November 1874 with his friend and pastor Joseph H. Twichell, the subject of a sequence of letters here, received detailed press coverage, as did his attendance at Henry Ward Beecher’s adultery trial in the spring of 1875. And Clemens’s friend William Seaver gave his doings and sayings regular space in the “Personal” columns of Harper’s Weekly and Bazar, and the “Editor’s Drawer” of Harper’s Monthly. As several of the letters included here show, not all such attention was gratifying, and some of it Clemens regarded as intentionally injurious. A rumor that he had paid for a complimentary dinner to himself triggered a flurry of irascible letters in the spring of 1874 as he attempted to determine its source and lay it to rest. Shortly afterward, when a bogus lecture agent, pretending to be his brother, defrauded Dubuque, Iowa, by selling tickets to a supposed lecture by Mark Twain and absconding with the proceeds, Clemens sent a temperate letter to the local papers, set the law on the offender, and then exploded in a letter to his brother about his failure to get satisfaction. A few months later he had to correct the New York Times for its publication of a spurious letter attributed to him and address a rumor, spread by the New York Sun, that he had not himself written his Gilded Age play. And in 1875 he had to stop yet another unauthorized dramatization of the book, this time in Salt Lake City, and also try, in vain, to prevent the unauthorized reprinting of his work in a popular anthology.

Aside from those and other irritations attendant on his growing celebrity, the years 1874 and 1875 were personally as well as professionally satisfying for Clemens. In June 1874 the Clemenses welcomed a second healthy daughter, Clara, “the great American Giantess—weighing 7 ¾ pounds, & all solid meat” (p. 157). Although Olivia “waltzed through” (p. 158) the delivery, her recovery was protracted—but not a serious threat to her always frail health. The Clemenses’ new house, on Farmington Avenue, under construction since May 1873, was “still full of carpenters & plumbers’ noises” (p. 237) and lacked some of its furnishings in September 1874, when they moved in after their usual summer in Elmira. Consequently, they lived for a time on the second floor, while leaving the first to the workmen. The furnishing and settling-in continued into 1875, but well before the end of that year they were comfortably established in the showplace that would be the center of family and social activities until 1891, a striking symbol of the life and accomplishments so vividly preserved here in Clemens’s letters.

M.B.F.   H.E.S.