Mark Twain: A Biography. The Personal and Literary Life of Samuel Langhorne Clemens by Albert Bigelow Paine, with Letters, Comments and Incidental Writings Hitherto Unpublished; Also New Episodes, Anecdotes, etc. 3 vols. New York and London: Harper and Brothers, 1912. BAL, p. 251. Copy used: copy #1, CU-MARK. Where MTB has served as copy-text, copy #1 (publisher’s code H-M on the copyright page of volume 1, signifying the first impression, ordered in August 1912) has been collated against copy #2 (code K-K, signifying an impression ordered in October 1935, which is the latest impression located). In 1935 Paine made a few corrections in the plates, but no variants in the texts of these letters have been found.

MTB was first issued in three volumes, then in four and later in two, all with the same pagination.1 Paine said that he had “obtained his data from direct and positive sources: letters, diaries, account-books, or other immediate memoranda” (1:xv). His industry in this respect was such that several letters he published have not since been found in their original form and are therefore known, for all practical purposes, only from his transcriptions (or occasional facsimiles) in MTB and MTL. Although the printer’s copy for MTB has not been found, it is known that Paine’s general method of acquiring letter texts was to borrow the original whenever possible, presumably transcribing it himself, probably on a typewriter, before returning the manuscript to its owner.2 He presumably had full access both to the documents (now in the Mark Twain Papers) that Clemens himself defined and set aside for his official biographer, and to those now in the McKinney Family Papers. He also had access to at least some of the letters in the Moffett Collection, but it is not known whether these were ever fully in his hands or transcribed for him. Although he published many of the letters now in the McKinney Family Papers, he published relatively few of those in the Moffett Collection.

MTB is necessarily copy-text for a few letters not republished in MTL. But letter texts in MTB are generally excerpts and, judging from collation with letters that are still extant in manuscript, they were more freely edited than the corresponding passages published in MTL. Excerpts from MTB appeared in Harper’s Monthly Magazine in thirteen installments, running from November 1911 through November 1912, hence largely before MTB appeared in September 1912. Collation shows that when the book and the magazine both include text for a letter, they sometimes contain evidence of having each derived independently from a common source (very likely a typescript and its carbon copy), even though each has also been separately copy-edited. Whenever persuasively authorial variants are found uniquely in both texts, the transcription is based on both. When such variants cannot be found, MTB is designated copy-text and the magazine, which was generally edited more heavily than the book, is treated as if it simply derived from MTB instead of their common source.

Mark Twain’s Letters, Arranged with Comment by Albert Bigelow Paine. 2 vols. New York and London: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1917. BAL 3525. Copy used: copy #1, CU-MARK. As indicated under MTB above, the letters published in MTL are generally more complete as well as more reliable than those extracted or published in full in MTB. Because printer’s copy for MTL has likewise not been found, it is not always clear what relation it bore to the printer’s copy for MTB. Transcriptions are based on both MTL and MTB only when persuasively authorial variants occur uniquely in both, thus establishing their independent derivation from the lost MS. Otherwise, if a letter text appears both in MTL and MTB, MTL is chosen as copy-text and MTB treated as if it simply derived from MTL instead of their common source.

Most of the letters published in MTL survive in their original manuscripts. Collation of these documents with their transcriptions in MTL shows, in addition to the expected errors and omissions, that a uniform style for the date line, greeting, complimentary closing, and signature lines was always imposed on the MTL transcription. The uniformity of this house styling is established by a very large body of letter manuscript, and Clemens’s consistency in using certain forms is likewise established by an even larger body of evidence. When the copy-text is necessarily MTL, this evidence is considered sufficient to permit the conjectural restoration of the likely forms in the original letter, at least in these uniformly styled lines. All emendations to remove this nonauthorial styling in MTL are, of course, recorded.

The Jean Webster McKinney Family Papers, housed in the Francis Fitz Randolph Rare Book Room, Helen D. Lockwood Library, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York (NPV). This collection was given to Vassar in 1977 by Jean and Ralph Connor, of Tymor Farm, LaGrangeville, New York. Jean Connor inherited the papers from her mother, Jean Webster McKinney, who had in turn inherited them from her mother, Annie Moffett Webster, Clemens’s niece and the wife of Charles L. Webster, his business partner from 1884 to 1888. The letters and other Clemens materials in the collection represent one of the three principal caches of family letters, having passed from Clemens to his mother, Jane Lampton Clemens (d. 1890), his brother Orion (d. 1897) and sister-in-law Mollie Clemens (d. January 1904), and ultimately to his sister Pamela A. Moffett (d. August 1904). Some of these documents went eventually to her son, Samuel E. Moffett (see the Moffett Collection, below) and some to her daughter, Annie E. Moffett, later Webster. Not surprisingly, therefore, several manuscript letters are now found partly in the McKinney Family Papers and partly in the Moffett Collection.

Mollie Clemens wrote her nephew Samuel Moffett on 31 July 1899 that “We never destroyed Sams letters—excepting at by his request, or a few no one should see” (CU-MARK). At least one partly destroyed (censored) letter survives in this collection (see pages 347–49), but by far the larger toll was probably taken by accidental physical damage or loss, and by the deliberate destruction, following Mollie Clemens’s death in 1904, of most of Clemens’s letters to his mother. As early as 1881, Orion Clemens had assembled a number of his brother’s letters written between about 1853 and 1865 as part of a sprawling manuscript for his own autobiography (never published), finding even then that not all the letters had been preserved intact. On 6 October 1899, Pamela Moffett sent an unknown number of original letters to her son, Samuel Moffett, then a journalist in California, saying in part that she “was sorry to see that parts of some of the letters were missing” (CU-MARK). Moffett tried to publish at least a few of these letters in biographical sketches of Clemens, but was eventually told to preserve them for publication after Clemens’s death. Some, if not all, of these letters must eventually have become part of the Moffett Collection, described below.

But in 1904, according to a 1935 Associated Press story in an unidentified newspaper, Mollie Clemens’s executor, John R. Carpenter, burned “almost four trunks” of Clemens’s letters to his mother, “as requested by the famous humorist.” Carpenter confided his story, according to this report, to Dr. G. Walter Barr of Keokuk, who gave this account:

That this story was not a fiction is suggested, at any rate, by the postscript of Clemens’s letter to Carpenter on 14 February 1904, the original draft of which survives in the Mark Twain Papers: “If there are any letters of mine, I beg that you will destroy them.”

The McKinney Family Papers consist of Clemens documents typically left by him, at various times, with his sister. They include his earliest surviving notebook (probably written in 1855; see N&J1, 11–39); half a dozen literary manuscripts, incomplete and unpublished, written principally between 1859 and 1868 (see ET&S1–3); more than six hundred letters and telegrams from Clemens to various members of his family, and to business associates like Webster, as well as family photographs and mementoes, and letters and documents by other family members and close associates (Simpson, 6–14).

The Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, California (CU-MARK). The core of this collection is the body of documents that Clemens made available to Albert Bigelow Paine for the official biography Paine was to produce, and from which Paine eventually published, selectively, an edition of letters, one of notebooks, and one of the autobiography. Since Clemens’s death in 1910, these papers have been successively in the care of Paine (1910–37); Bernard DeVoto at Harvard (1938–46); Dixon Wecter at the Huntington Library, San Marino, and later at the University of California, Berkeley (1946–50); Henry Nash Smith (1953–63); and Frederick Anderson (1963–79), both of the latter at the University of California in Berkeley, and both successors to Paine, DeVoto, and Wecter as the official literary executor for the Clemens estate. Upon the death of Clara Clemens Samossoud in 1962, the papers were bequeathed to the University of California, and in 1971 they became part of The Bancroft Library, where they now reside.

The original collection segregated by Clemens for Paine included forty-five of the approximately fifty extant notebooks kept by Clemens between 1855 and 1910; approximately seventeen thousand letters received by Clemens or his family; an estimated six hundred literary manuscripts, most of them unpublished, including the autobiographical dictations; as well as photographs, clippings, contracts, and a variety of other documents originally owned by Clemens. Since Paine’s tenure, primary and secondary documents have been added to this assemblage in various ways, ranging from gifts both of photocopy and original manuscripts and documents, to large purchases and bequests comprising many hundreds of letters, to the systematic compilation of a secondary archive of photocopies collected from the owners of original manuscripts and other documents around the world. Four major acquisitions of original letter manuscripts are especially pertinent here.

Samossoud Collection (c. 1952), The Mark Twain Papers. Among the documents apparently not made wholly available to Paine were the letters written by Clemens to his fiancée and wife, Olivia Langdon, and later to their daughters Susie, Clara, and Jean. The letters to Olivia were sold to the University of California in about 1952 by Clara’s husband, Jacques Samossoud. Other parts of this large cache of family letters still held by Clara and her husband were sold or given by them to other persons and institutions, not all yet identified. No letters from the Samossoud Collection appear in the first volume of Mark Twain’s Letters, but every subsequent volume will contain at least one.

Moffett Collection (1954), The Mark Twain Papers. This collection represents that portion of Pamela Moffett’s papers that was given to her son Samuel instead of her daughter Annie (see McKinney Family Papers, above). The collection became the property of Samuel Moffett’s daughter Anita Moffett (d. 1952), either upon his death in 1908, or upon the death of her younger brother, Francis Clemens Moffett, in 1927. The papers were discovered in 1954, in a warehouse sale that included some of her effects: sixteen hundred letters by Clemens, his family, and associates, including Pamela Moffett’s letters to her son and daughter; ten scrapbooks of newspaper clippings for the period 1858–1898, evidently compiled by Orion Clemens and containing original printings of Clemens’s and his brother’s western journalism; deeds to the brothers’ 1860s Nevada mining claims; family photographs and a family Bible. This acquisition was made possible for the University of California in 1954 by a group of anonymous donors. The inventory of Clemens letters made at the time was not always specific enough to enable the editors now to be certain whether some letters were part of the Moffett Collection or were already in the Mark Twain Papers.

Tufts Collection (1971), The Mark Twain Papers. This collection was assembled chiefly by James Tufts, at one time managing editor of the San Francisco Examiner and an acquaintance of Clemens’s. It was purchased in 1971 from Tufts’ son, Dr. John M. Tufts, Kentifield, California. The collection includes twenty-three original letters by Clemens, literary manuscripts, first printings of his sketches, first editions of his books, and photographs.

Appert Collection (1973 and 1977), The Mark Twain Papers. The gift of Mr. and Mrs. Kurt E. Appert, Pebble Beach, California, the collection includes more than fifty letters by Clemens, literary manuscripts, photographs, letters to Clemens, first editions of his works, and books from his library.