To
William Wright (Dan De Quille)
28 January 1876 • Hartford, Conn.
(MS: CLjC, UCCL 01304)
(SUPERSEDED)
Hartford Jan. 28
Dear Dan:
I have been through that mill (of “When is your book going to be out?”) so often that it long ago ceased to have any power to annoy me—though when the “Innocents” was in press I confess I wished a million times that I had never written a book. It is the same mill that every man who projects an enterprise of any kind has got to suffer anguish in once. It isn’t confined to book scribblers, by a long shot. How many hundred times a week do you suppose Mackey is asked when the new machinery will be up, & when the new mills will be finished, & all that sort of thing? Keep your shirt on, man, & remember what I long ago told you—viz., that Bliss never yet came within 4 months of getting a book out at the time he said he would. On the Innocents he fell short overstepped his word & his contract 13 13 months—& I suffered questioning all that time.1
Williams has finished the pictures for my book & tells me ‸he‸ is on at work on yours, now.
You needn’t speak to Mackey any more about those letters.2 I can It doesn’t matter. But you may send me a peck of your best pine nuts per express, at your earliest convenience, with bill for the same. I want to spread them before company for a novelty. Your book is going to interfere a good deal with my Sketches, but I don’t mind that., if it don’t interfere too much.3
Yrs.
Mark.
4Explanatory Notes
People here
are becoming very impatient, as I told them some time ago that it would be out about the 1st of January;
Mark Twain having written me to that effect. . . . I wish you to get out the book as soon as possible, without cutting
down the illustrations. Please let me know about how soon you can get it out, as I am asked dozens of times every day and no longer
know what answer to make. I am also getting many subscribers of which I make mental note; if I knew when the book would be out I might
be taking down the names of these, but as it is now I can give the would-be subscribers no satisfaction in regard to the time when the
book will make its appearance. Please let me know this and send me the proper authority for receiving subscriptions. In a letter of 5 November 1875, Clemens had urged
Bliss to “rush Dan’s book into print, by New Year’s, if possible” (L6, 585). The letter to Wright in which Clemens projected a January 1876 publication
date for The Big Bonanza is not known to survive, however.
Wright
alluded to: Henry R. Linderman (1825–79), physician and first director of the Bureau
of the Mint, who had recently conducted an official examination that confirmed the richness of Nevada’s big bonanza silver
discovery of 1874, but whose map of “the lower levels” was not reproduced in De Quille’s book; the Paiute Indians,
for whom pine nuts were a dietary staple; A. L. Bancroft and Company, the San Francisco publishers who acted as West Coast agent for
the American Publishing Company; Clemens’s “A Literary Nightmare”; Frank, as well as Elisha, Bliss ; and Joseph T. and Ellen Goodman (APC 1866–79,134; Angel 1881, 150, 169,
619; L6, 425 n. 2).
Copy-text:Previous publication:
Berkove
1988, 9.
Provenance:The MS was one of nine letters from Clemens to Wright which after Wright’s death “were left with his daughter,
Mell Evans. She, in turn, passed them on to her daughter, Irma Evans Morris. Effie Mona Mack learned of them while doing research for
Mark Twain in Nevada [(Mack
1947)],
and purchased photographic negatives of them” (Berkove
1988, 4, 18
n. 1). Mrs. Morris bequeathed the letters to her three children. After Evans Morris’s death in 1990, the letters were sold,
and most were purchased from Admirable Books in March 1993 by CLjC. Owned in
1989 by Evans Morris, Rosemary Morris, and Marjory Anderson, descendants of William Wright, the manuscript was subsequently bought by
CLjC.
