To Willard McKinstry
28 January 1871 • Buffalo, N.Y.
(MS: ViU, UCCL 00569)

Buffalo, Jan. 28.

W. McKinstry, Esq
Dear Sir:

I thank you very much indeed for your kind invitation to attend the celebration of an event which, in this country (yes, in any country,) is so unusual as to well deserve to be termed remarkable—& that, too, with emphasis,—the [ fifth fiftieth ]birth-day of a newspaper! We are accustomed to contemplate the sixty-six the seventy years of the New York Evening Post & the one hundred & six years of the Hart Connecticut Courant with a sort of awe-inspired veneration—& here you come startling us with a half-century veteran reared in a western village! I doff my hat to the hale patriarch, & record the hope that the Fredonia Censeor may still be hale at a hundred & fifty!1

Sincerely regretting my inability to be present f at the dinner, I am

Ys Truly

Mark Twain.

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1 Willard McKinstry (1815–99), publisher and editor of the Fredonia Censor since 1842, whom Clemens had probably met when he lectured in Fredonia in January 1870, had sent a printed invitation to a fiftieth anniversary supper in honor of the paper’s founder, Henry C. Frisbee (1801–73). The Censor published Clemens’s letter on 8 February, along with similar communications from Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune, David Gray of the Buffalo Courier, and others. Clemens’s mother and sister had been living in Fredonia since April 1870 (Chautauqua County, 2:107–9; “The Semi-Centennial Anniversary of the Fredonia Censor,” Fredonia Censor, 8 Feb 71, 1).

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

MS. Clifton Waller Barrett Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville (ViU).

Previous publication: L4, 321–322; “From Mark Twain,” Fredonia Censor, 8 Feb 71, 1.

Provenance:deposited at ViU by Clifton Waller Barrett on 17 December 1963.

Emendations and textual notes:

fifth fiftieth • fif‸tie‸th fiftieth