editorial office of the atlantic monthly. the riverside press, cambridge, mass.
Aug. 5, 1876.
My dear Clemens:
I wrote you a long and affectionate letter just before you left Hartford, and you replied with a postal card; on which, instantly forgetting all the past kindnesses between us, I dropped you. You may not have known it but I did. Now I find I can’t very well get on without hearing from you, and I wish you would give me your news—what you are doing, thinking, saying. We went first to our Shaker place in Shirley Village, but that proved a wonderful failure, and ten days ̭ago̭ we came away to this place—Townsend Harbor, Mass.,—where we find ourselves in the utmost clover, and where we propose to stay till November.—I’ve just finished my comedy, “Out of the Question,” with a fair degree of satisfaction, and now I’m about to begin a campaign life of Hayes, which Mr. Houghton wants to publish. (You know I wrote the life of Lincoln which elected him.) I expect that it will sell; at any rate I like the man, and shall like doing it. Gen. Hayes is Mrs. Howells cousin, and she thinks that any one who votes for Tilden will go to the Bad Place.
What are you doing with your double-barrel novel? Now that books are so dreadfully dead, why don’t you think of selling it to the Atlantic for next year? Mr. Houghton wants me to ask you to name a price, and he promises to prosecute any body who copies it.
My wife joins me in cordial regards to Mrs. Clemens.
Yours ever
W. D. Howells.
