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Letters

“I am a long time answering your letter, my dear Miss Harriet, but then you must remember that it is an equally long time since I received it—so that makes us even, & nobody to blame on either side.”
—Mark Twain, 1876


Mark Twain Letter

Online Now

Mark Twain's Letters, 1853–1880

  • Electronic Title Page
  • 1853–1875
    Texts with annotation, previously published by the Mark Twain Project in six volumes as Mark Twain's Letters (1988–2002)
  • 1876–1880
    Texts with annotation: 1876 and 1877; texts only: 1878–1880; more than 700 letter texts, with some facsimiles of originals
  • Letters newly published
    Part 1, 1862–1879 (55); Part 2, 1853–1869 (31)
    Previously unpublished letters inserted in chronological sequence, with more to come—see Recent Changes

Getting Started

Letters Chronology

All letters now online are listed and linked here, in date order.
Browse letters by clicking on the categories to the left.

Available Searches [ How to search ]

  • Search the texts of Mark Twain's letters from 1853 through 1880, including or excluding the annotation and other scholarly resources.
  • Search for information about Mark Twain's complete correspondence across his entire life, including letters to him and his family.

Tools for Understanding Letters

Our Research Resources include short biographies, genealogies of the Clemens and Langdon families, the project's Guide to Editorial Practice, maps, documents, and more.

MTPO offers the only scholarly edition of Mark Twain's complete letters, critically edited, annotated, and arranged in chronological order. Continually added to and updated, the Letters edition, with its extensive editorial notes, forms a detailed running account of Mark Twain's life.

Most of these texts have been digitized from the Mark Twain Project's printed volumes. Although every effort has been made to ensure accurate conversion, errors do persist. MTPO searches out and corrects these errors, and welcomes input from users.