1 Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1836–1907), whom Clemens did not actually meet until late in 1871 (1 Nov 71 to OLC, n. 3). Aldrich was born and educated in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, which served as the setting for many of his literary works. In 1852, lacking the funds to attend Harvard (a consequence of his father’s death in 1849), he moved to New York to work as a clerk in his uncle’s business. Almost immediately he began to publish poems in various journals, eventually joining the editorial staffs of the Evening Mirror, Home Journal, and Saturday Press. During 1861–62 he served as Civil War correspondent for the New York Tribune and, briefly in 1863, as managing editor of the New York Illustrated News. In 1865, having published several books of poetry and short stories (the first in 1855), he married Lilian Woodman and moved to Boston, where James R. Osgood had offered him the editorship of Every Saturday, a post he held from 1866 to 1874. In 1869, he published The Story of A Bad Boy, about which Clemens remarked to Olivia Langdon: “I could not admire the volume much” (L3, 440; Wolf, 43–46; Price, 4–5; Greenslet, 15–16, 56, 58, 76). Clemens and Aldrich enjoyed a lifelong friendship.

2 Aldrich published this letter, without its dateline, in the 4 February issue of Every Saturday, explaining that

Some newspapers did assume that Hy Slocum and Carl Byng (author of “The Three Aces”) were alternative pseudonyms for Mark Twain, and therefore reprinted their sketches from the Buffalo Express as if they in fact were his. For example, see: “A Humorous View of the Farmers’ Club. Mark Twain’s Report of the Proceedings,” Pittsburgh Gazette, 7 Dec 70, 2, reprinting Byng 1870; and “Mark Twain on Yaller Dogs,” San Francisco Golden City, 19 Dec 69, 2, reprinting Slocum 1869.