Friend [Bliss.
The ]Editor of the Overland Monthly writes as enclosed. Isn’t Bancroft doing rather meanly in this matter? Will you answer the enclosed postmaster & the Pittsburgh man & oblige [yrs.1
Clemens]
Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary
He praised the book so highly that I wanted him to
review it early for the Overland, so
that I could & help the sale out there. I told
the my publisher. He ordered Bancroft to send Harte a
couple of books before anybody else. Bancroft declined! I wrote
a not Harte & enclosed an order on
Bancroft for 2 book[s] & directing that the
bill be sent deducted from my publishers returns or sent
to me. Mr. Bancroft “preferred the
money.” Good, wasn’t it? {He
wrote me the other day, asking me to help get him agency for my new
book for Pacific & the Orient—which I didn’t.} Well, sir, Harte
wrote me the most daintily contemptuous
& insulting letter you ever
read—& what I want to know, is, where I was to blame? (26 Nov 70 to Charles Henry
Webb, ViU) Harte’s long and complimentary review appeared
in the Overland Monthly in January 1870. He
characterized Innocents as “six
hundred and fifty pages of open and declared fun” and said
that it confirmed his belief “that Mr. Clemens deserves to
rank foremost among Western humorists” (Harte 1870, 100, 101).
Source text(s):Previous publication:
L3, 355–356; none known other than the copy-text.
Provenance:The MS, presumably kept in the American Publishing Company files after
receipt, was in 1899 tipped into volume 1 of The Innocents
Abroad, the first volume of a special issue of one thousand sets of
the “Edition de Luxe” of The
Writings of Mark Twain. The present location of the MS, possibly
part of either the Ormond G. Smith or George E. Chisolm collection before
its sale in 1938, is not known.
Emendations and textual notes:
Buffalo, Sept. 21, 1869. • [reported, not quoted; the month is spelled out in the usual catalog style]
Bliss. [¶] The • Bliss. [no ¶] The
yrs. | Clemens • yrs. Clemens
