My Mark Twain From Literary Friends And Acquaintance

For more than forty years William Dean Howells counted Mark Twain among his closest friends. Howells knew all the great men of American literature during the last half of the nineteenth century. In his acquaintance were Longfellow, Emerson, Lowell, Holmes, and a long list of other sages, poets, novelists, and critics. “They were like on another and like other literary men,” Howells wrote, “but Clemens was sole, incomparable, the Lincoln of our literature.” Mark Twin’s death on April 21, 1910, moved Howells to record his memories of the man he felt “pervaded” the era “almost more than any other man of letters.” His reminiscences were published in Harper’s Monthly and subsequently put into book form along with twelve pieces of Howells’ criticism of Mark Twain’s work. This is the first new edition of the book since the original printing in 1910. Both the sketch and the essays have been annotated to give the reader a full appreciation of Mark Twain’s growth as a writer and Howells’ increasing awareness of his friends’ greatness. The notes identify and explain the literary issues, the people, places, and events to which Howells alludes. The long friendship between Howells and Mark Twain fostered innumerable visits, extensive correspondence, joint literary projects, and often humorous escapades. To a great degree Howells identified with Clemens. Both men were of midwestern origin and came from similar backgrounds. They encountered literary Boston together. Both experienced domestic tragedy. The immediacy of My Mark Twain affords the reader a rare and intimate picture of Mark Twain and indirectly, of Howells.

My Mark Twain (from Literary Friends and Acquaintance) by William Dean Howells is a rare manuscript, the original residing in some of the great libraries of the world. This book is a reproduction of that original, typed out and formatted to perfection, allowing new generations to enjoy the work. Publishers of the Valley's mission is to bring long out of print manuscripts back to life.

Reproduction of the original.

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William Dean Howells (1837-1920) was an American realist author and literary critic. He wrote his first novel, Their Wedding Journey, in 1871, but his literary reputation really took off with the realist novel A Modern Instance, published in 1882, which describes the decay of a marriage. His 1885 novel The Rise of Silas Lapham is perhaps his best known, describing the rise and fall of an American entrepreneur in the paint business. His social views were also strongly reflected in the novels Annie Kilburn (1888) and A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890). While known primarily as a novelist, his short story "Editha" (1905) - included in the collection Between the Dark and the Daylight (1907) - appears in many anthologies of American literature. Howells also wrote plays, criticism, and essays about contemporary literary figures such as Ibsen, Zola, Verga, and, especially, Tolstoy, which helped establish their reputations in the United States. He also wrote critically in support of many American writers. It is perhaps in this role that he had his greatest influence.

Mr. William Dean Howells has written many books of several kinds which have entertained a great many people of all kinds, but no single book of any kind in which his various talents appear to such advantage to themselves and enjoyment of their readers as in his 'Literary Friends and Acquaintance', which, briefly described as a personal retrospect of American authorship, is in reality a series of portraits and miniatures of American men, women and, figuratively, in some cases, children of the pen, a gallery of literary likenesses, drawn from life, with a skillful but kindly pencil, and in the light that lingers like a halo around their lessening memories. Mr. Howells divides his retrospects into eight parts, and being personal they are in a sense chronological — successive records of his autorial career, the steps of his journeys into the domain of authorship, and his impressions of certain of their inhabitants, of their individualities — their work, or play, or whatever else seemed to distinguish them at the moment from the profane or vulgar, who did not write for fame, or scribble for bread. The headings of these parts, or chapters, are indications of these journeys, which were eastward, Mr. Howells' course of empire reversing that of Bishop Berkeley, which took its way westward, the first being entitled '"My First Visit to New England," the second "First Impressions of Literary New York," the third and fourth "Roundabout to Boston" and "Literary Boston as I Knew It," and so on through separate personal chapters devoted to Holmes, Longfellow and Lowell, the last being a gathering-in of Mr. Howells' "Cambridge Neighbors."

At the time of our first meeting, which must have been well toward the winter, Clemens (as I must call him instead of Mark Twain, which seemed always somehow to mask him from my personal sense) was wearing a sealskin coat, with the fur out, in the satisfaction of a caprice, or the love of strong effect which he was apt to indulge through life. I do not know what droll comment was in Fields's mind with respect to this garment, but probably he felt that here was an original who was not to be brought to any Bostonian book in the judgment of his vivid qualities. With his crest of dense red hair, and the wide sweep of his flaming mustache, Clemens was not discordantly clothed in that sealskin coat, which afterward, in spite of his own warmth in it, sent the cold chills through me when I once accompanied it down Broadway, and shared the immense publicity it won him. He had always a relish for personal effect, which expressed itself in the white suit of complete serge which he wore in his last years, and in the Oxford gown which he put on for every possible occasion, and said he would like to wear all the time. That was not vanity in him, but a keen feeling for costume which the severity of our modern tailoring forbids men, though it flatters women to every excess in it; yet he also enjoyed the shock, the offence, the pang which it gave the sensibilities of others. Then there were times he played these pranks for pure fun, and for the pleasure of the witness.He was a youth to the end of his days, the heart of a boy with the head of a sage; the heart of a good boy, or a bad boy, but always a wilful boy, and wilfulest to show himself out at every time for just the boy he was.