Mark Twain's Letters, Volume 4: 1870-1871 / Edition 1

by Mark Twain, Victor Fischer, Michael Barry Frank, Lin Salamo

Overview

"You ought to see Livy & me, now-a-days—you never saw such a serenely satisfied couple of doves in all your life. I spent Jan 1, 2, 3 & 5 there, & left at 8 last night. With my vile temper & variable moods, it seems an incomprehensible miracle that we two have been right together in the same house half the time for a year & a half, & yet have never had a cross word, or a lover's 'tiff,' or a pouting spell, or a misunderstanding, or the faintest shadow of a jealous suspicion. Now isn't that absolutely wonderful? Could I have had such an experience with any other girl on earth? I am perfectly certain I could not. . . . We are to be married on Feb. 2d."

So begins Volume 4 of the letters, with Samuel Clemens anticipating his wedding to Olivia L. Langdon. The 338 letters in this volume document the first two years of a loving marriage that would last more than thirty years. They recount, in Clemens's own inimitable voice, a tumultuous time: a growing international fame, the birth of a sickly first child, and the near-fatal illness of his wife.

At the beginning of 1870, fresh from the success of The Innocents Abroad, Clemens is on "the long agony" of a lecture tour and planning to settle in Buffalo as editor of the Express. By the end of 1871, he has moved to Hartford and is again on tour, anticipating the publication of Roughing It and the birth of his second child. The intervening letters show Clemens bursting with literary ideas, business schemes, and inventions, and they show him erupting with frustration, anger, and grief, but more often with dazzling humor and surprising self-revelation. In addition to Roughing It, Clemens wrote some enduringly popular short pieces during this period, but he saved some of his best writing for private letters, many of which are published here for the first time.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520203600
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	12/27/1995
Series:	Mark Twain Papers , #9
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	828
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 2.20(d)

About the Author

Victor Fischer, Michael B. Frank, and Lin Salamo are editors with the Mark Twain Project at The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

Date of Birth:

November 30, 1835

Date of Death:

April 21, 1910

Place of Birth:

Florida, Missouri

Place of Death:

Redding, Connecticut

Editorial Reviews

With more than half published here for the first time, the 338 letters in the most recent volume of this meticulously edited and richly illustrated edition of Twain's letters cover only two years of his long, prolific life. But during those years, at ages 34 and 35, he first swore off the lecture circuit, then changed his mind; married Olivia Langdon and spent the first years of their long marriage-in the $40,000 house given them by Mr. Langdon-idolizing her and comforting her when she fell victim to typhoid fever and gave birth to a sickly son. By this time The Innocents Abroad was earning him $1300 a month, he was part-owner of the Buffalo Express newspaper, and money flowed in from other sources. But Twain was a man on the make-with an expensive lifestyle. In these letters, charged with nervous energy, he urged his increasingly hapless brother Orion to pursue promising inventions, complained about mediocre lecture fees, talked business schemes with his publisher, and inadvertently revealed the agonizingly slow evolution of Roughing It. This volume, like the others in the series, is essential for all libraries with a Twain collection.-Charles C. Nash, Cottey Coll., Nevada, Mo.

Library Journal