Details
CLEMENS, Samuel Langhorne. Autograph letter signed ("Mark") to his close friend, the Rev. Joseph Twitchell of Hartford, Conn.; Buffalo 3 [January 1871]. 2 pages, 8vo, in purple ink on both sides of a ruled sheet, with a few revisions, a long fold tear neatly repaired on verso just slightly obscuring parts of four letters, left edge a trifle rough where separated from an integral blank leaf (not present).
PRAISING CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER'S FIRST BOOK
Twitchell had told Twain the previous month about Warner's just published My Summer in a Garden, a collection of humorous essays about his small farm. Clemens writes: "I tell you it is magnificent -- rich, delicious, fascinating, brim full of meat -- the humor transcends anything I have seen in print or heard from a stage this many a day -- & every page glitters like a cluster-pin with many-sided gems of fancy -- Warner's book I mean -- it is splendid. But I haven't dressed yet -- the barber is waiting to shave me, Livy [his wife] & the rest of the family are clamoring for breakfast & it does seem that a body can't sit down in his shirt-tail to drop a friendly line to a friend without all the elements 'going for' him..." Warner, of course, would be Twain's collaborator on their first novel, The Gilded Age, published in 1874. Printed in Letters, ed. H.E. Smith, R. Bucci, and L. Salamo, vol. 4, p. 294.
PRAISING CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER'S FIRST BOOK
Twitchell had told Twain the previous month about Warner's just published My Summer in a Garden, a collection of humorous essays about his small farm. Clemens writes: "I tell you it is magnificent -- rich, delicious, fascinating, brim full of meat -- the humor transcends anything I have seen in print or heard from a stage this many a day -- & every page glitters like a cluster-pin with many-sided gems of fancy -- Warner's book I mean -- it is splendid. But I haven't dressed yet -- the barber is waiting to shave me, Livy [his wife] & the rest of the family are clamoring for breakfast & it does seem that a body can't sit down in his shirt-tail to drop a friendly line to a friend without all the elements 'going for' him..." Warner, of course, would be Twain's collaborator on their first novel, The Gilded Age, published in 1874. Printed in Letters, ed. H.E. Smith, R. Bucci, and L. Salamo, vol. 4, p. 294.