To Olivia L. Clemens
11 March 1877 • Boston, Mass.
(MS, correspondence card in pencil: Christie’s,
New York, December 1991, UCCL 02863)

Howells’s 5

Sunday.

slcLivy darling, we perplexed ourselves all day yesterday over plots & counter plots, & dreamed over them all night. Unsatisfactory. We drop back, now, to the original proposition—Howells to write the play, dropping in the skeleton of Orm’s speeches, I to take him, later, & fill him out.1 I expect to remain at Parker’s in Boston, tomorrow & return home Tuesday. I love you my darling.

Saml

Mrs. Samℓ. L. Clemens | Hartford | Conn [return address:] the atlantic monthlythe riverside press, cambridge, mass. [postmarked] boston mass. mar 11

Explanatory Notes

Editorial Signs

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1Clemens traveled to Boston and Cambridge sometime around 9 March, staying at the Parker House, evidently returning to Hartford on 13 March. The goal of this trip was to confer with Howells on the plan of a collaborative play entitled Orme’s Motor. Originally featuring a feckless inventor (to be based on Orion Clemens), the play was several times discussed and replanned over the next few years, eventually becoming Colonel Sellers as a Scientist (SLC 1883b). That play, written in 1883, was withdrawn while in production in 1886 (for a discussion and a text of it, see Howells 1960, 205–41). It served as the basis of Clemens’s 1892 novel The American Claimant (1892).

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

MS, correspondence card, in pencil, seen at Christie’s, New York, while awaiting sale in December 1991.

Previous publication:

Christie’s catalog, sale of 5 December 1991, lot 193, partial publication. The catalog misdates the envelope postmark 1886; MicroPUL, reel 1.

Provenance:

Chester L. Davis, Sr., probably acquired the MS from Clara Clemens Samossoud sometime between 1949 and 1962 (see Samossoud Collection in Description of Provenance). After his death in 1987, the MS was owned by Chester L. Davis, Jr., who sold it through Christie’s in December 1991.