5 December 1876 • Hartford, Conn. (MS, postal card, in pencil: MH-H, UCCL 01392)
If there is another magazine in Toronto (or Montreal) I want to give it advanced sheets. BelfordⒶemendation Bros., the miserable thieves have couldn’t buy a sentence from me for any money.1explanatory note Is there another magazine—I earnestly want to give advanced sheets to it. Tell me if there is.2explanatory note
us postal card. | write the address on this side—the message on the other | W D Howells, Esq 37 Concord ave Cambridge Mass postmarked: hartford conn. dec 5 6pm
Clemens answered the following note from Howells, written on the back of its enclosure and mailed on 4 December (CU-MARK):
Howells’s cover note alluded to Anna Dickinson’s novel about an interracial romance, What Answer?, which he had reviewed tolerantly, but negatively, in the Atlantic Monthly for January 1869 (Dickinson 1868; Howells 1869; Atlantic Index 1889, 105). The request from Belford Brothers was in response to “The Atlantic Monthly for 1877. Twentieth Year,” in the front advertising pages of the December 1876 number of the magazine. There it was announced that Mark Twain “will be a frequent contributor to the Atlantic during the year.” In fact, at this time Clemens was committed for only a single article—which, Howells knew, was about Dickinson—for the January 1877 “Contributors’ Club” (11 Oct 1876 to Howellsclick to open link, n. 11). Howells’s reply to Clemens’s letter has not been found.
References
- Harvard University, Houghton Library, Cambridge, Mass.
- Machlis, Paul, ed. Union Catalog of Clemens Letters. Edited by Paul Machlis. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press. [In some cases, UCCL catalog numbers cited in this volume supersede those assigned in 1986 and reflect corrections or additions to the catalog since publication. An updated version of the catalog can be consulted via the Letters Search page at MTPO.] 1986
- MTHL. Mark Twain–Howells Letters. Edited by Henry Nash Smith and William M. Gibson, with the assistance of Frederick Anderson. 2 vols. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 1960
- University of California, Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library, Berkeley
- Dickinson, Anna E. What Answer? Boston: Ticknor and Fields. 1868
- Howells, William Dean. Review of What Answer? by Anna E. Dickinson. In “Reviews and Literary Notices,” Atlantic Monthly 23 (January): 134–35 1869
- Atlantic Index. The Atlantic Index: A List of Articles, with Names of Authors Appended, Published in “The Atlantic Monthly,” from Its Establishment in 1857 to the Close of the Sixty-Second Volume in 1888. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Co. 1889
MS, postal card, in pencil, MH-H, shelf mark bMS Am 1784 (98).
MTHL , 1:167.
See Howells Letters in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.