BIB_ID
210560
Accession number
MA 1405
Creator
Clemens, Samuel Langhorne, 1835-1910.
Display Date
[1873 late Jan. or early Feb.].
Credit line
Purchased by Pierpont Morgan, 1910.
Description
1 item (11 p.) ; 18.7 cm
Notes
Anecdotes about Captain Sellers and Clemens's adoption of the pen name "Mark Twain" discussed in his Life on the Mississippi (See MA 679, p. 75, second series of pagination).
Notes dated to late January or early February of 1873 by Prof. Kruse in 1993.
Notes dated to late January or early February of 1873 by Prof. Kruse in 1993.
Provenance
Written by Clemens for his friend and neighbor Charles Dudley Warner; purchased by Pierpont Morgan from Walter Bliss in 1910.
Summary
Autobiographical sketch up to 1872, including an anecdote about his intention in 1855 to take a ship from New Orleans to "explore the river Amazon & open up a commerce in the marvelous herb called Coca," noting that he was "broken-hearted to find that a vessel would not be likely to leave N[ew] O[rleans] for Para during the next generation." Describing life as a pilot on the Mississippi and his "first literary overture" which caused a very old pilot, Captain Sellers, who had previously published under the name "Mark Twain," never to write again. Describing travels to Nevada, where he "got the silver fever," later travels to California and the Sandwich Islands, and how, on the death of Sellers, he "jumped his nom de plume before the old man was cold."
Housed in
Half morocco box (27.5 cm)
Catalog link
Department