An astonishingly dull but comprehensively annotated collection of
letters from an unexceptional period in Twain's life. Like the
phone book, this is one of those hefty tomes you're terribly glad
exists, even though there's little reason to go through it cover to
cover. Its very thoroughness, its rounding up of every epistolary
scrap, from bills, to perfunctory thank-yous, to itineraries of
arrivals and departures, ensures vast stretches of tedium. But even
when not quarreling over printing details with his publisher or
setting up dates for speaking tours, Twain the correspondent bears
little relationship to Twain the genius of 19th-century American
literature. Even when he is corresponding with intimate friends or
his beloved wife, Olivia (Livy), there is an unrevealing quality to
almost every letter, as if he were deliberately resting his talent.
Salamo and Smith (members of the Mark Twain Project at the Bancroft
Library, Univ. of California) are to be commended for the
incredible depth, range, and detail of their work. Their
scholarship is impeccable, their erudition extensive - one has the
feeling that they could probably account for almost every hour of
Twain's life - and learned footnotes abound, often dwarfing the
brief letters. During this time span, Twain embarked on building a
house, suffered the death of a child, and made regular visits to
England, sometimes to lecture, sometimes to bask in the warm
admiration of the British. He also published his only cowritten
book (The Gilded Age, with Charles Dudley Warner). But Huckleberry
Finn and the full flowering of Twain's talent are still several
years away. A major scholarly resource, but slow-going and
unrewarding, proof of how compartmentalized genius can sometimes
be. (Kirkus Reviews)
The fifth in the complete edition of Mark Twain's letters, this
volume contains 309 letters capturing the events between 1872-1873.
Annotated and indexed, they are supplemented by genealogical charts
of the Clemens and Langdon families, a transcription of the
journals Samuel Clemens kept during his 1872 visit to England, book
contracts, his preface to the English edition of "The Gilded Age",
contemporary photographs of family and friends, and a gathering of
newly discovered letters between 1865 and 1871. This volume is the
24th in the comprehensive edition known as "The Mark Twain Papers"
and "Works of Mark Twain".
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