1 Thomas Nast’s fame as an illustrator and political caricaturist was well established in the fall of 1867, when he first met Clemens and, as Clemens later recalled, proposed a joint lecture tour “when I was unknown” (12 Nov 77 to Nast, NN-B, in MTL, 1:311). Nast (1840–1902) had come to New York at the age of six from his native Landau, Germany. After attending the Academy of Design, he sold his first commercial illustrations in 1855 to Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, published his first political cartoons in the late 1850s in Harper’s Weekly, and traveled in the United States and Europe in 1859–61 for the New York Illustrated News and other periodicals, illustrating such occurrences as John Brown’s funeral and Garibaldi’s revolt. Hired by Harper’s Weekly in 1862 as a staff artist, his cartoons endorsing emancipation and supporting the North’s vigorous prosecution of the Civil War inspired Lincoln to call him “our best recruiting sergeant” (DAB, 13:392). After the war, he remained with Harper’s Weekly, where he published political cartoons almost continuously, focusing especially on the failures of Reconstruction and on the need for political reform in New York City. In 1870 he and Harper’s launched a campaign against William Marcy Tweed and Tammany Hall that continued through 1871, arousing the public outrage that resulted in Tweed’s arrest on criminal charges on 7 November. Nast also illustrated several books, including Mary Mapes Dodge’s Hans Brinker: or, The Silver Skates (1866), Petroleum V. Nasby’s Ekkoes from Kentucky (1868), and Henry William Pullen’s Fight at Dame Europa’s School (1871) (“Thomas Nast,” Harper’s Weekly 15 [26 Aug 71]: Supplement, 803; “The Great American Cartoonist,” Harper’s Weekly 46 [20 Dec 1902]: 1972; “Death of Thomas Nast,” New York Times, 8 Dec 1902, 1).

2 Nast had asked permission to reprint something by Clemens in his forthcoming Th. Nast’s Illustrated Almanac for 1872, the first in a series of such annual booklets he published through Harpers (Nast). On 24 April 1871, he replied to the present letter:

“Advice for Good Little Girls” was available in the Jumping Frog book. Both “The Story of the Good Little Boy Who Did Not Prosper” and “The Late Benjamin Franklin” appeared in the Galaxy (SLC: 1867, 164–66; 1870 [MT00901], 724–26; 1870 [MT00936], 138–40; ET&S2, 243–45). Clemens replied almost immediately: see 27? Apr 71 to Nast.