Mark Twain Project :: Letters :: : an electronic text

To William Wright (Dan De Quille)
29 November 1876 • Hartford, Conn.
(MS, correspondence card, in pencil: CLjC, UCCL 02466)
(SUPERSEDED)

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Hartford, Nov. 29.

slc

Dear Dan—Please sell that confounded stock & send me the remains. I never did meddle with stocks without botching it.1

This makes ten letters I have written you without getting an answer.2 You only write when you want me to run to your darned publisher, Dan.3 But never mind, that is human nature—nobody writes to anybody except to ask a favor—as I’m doing now.

Yrs Ever

Mark

Explanatory Notes

Editorial Signs

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1 The mining stock that Clemens first asked Wright to purchase for him in February 1876 (see 8 Feb 76, 7 Mar 76, and 26 Mar 76, all to Wright).

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2 Including the present letter, only six letters to Wright survive from 1876. Clemens wrote the others on 5 January, 28 January, 8 February, 7 March, and 26 March. Wright answered at least the third and fourth of these (7 March 76 to Wright, n. 1; 26 Mar 76 to Wright, n. 1).

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3 Elisha Bliss, publisher of Wright’s Big Bonanza (Wright 1876).

Description of Texts and Provenance

Copy-text:

MS, correspondence card, in pencil, CLjC.

glyph Previous publication: Berkove 1988, 9.

glyph 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.