To
William Dean Howells
19 April 1877 • Hartford, Conn. (MS, correspondence card, in pencil: MH-H, UCCL 01413)
19 April 1877 • Hartford, Conn. (MS, correspondence card, in pencil: MH-H, UCCL 01413)
Apr. 19.
slcMy Dear Howells:
Many thanks. I was not intending to intrude on the President, but I shall certainly go now & present your letter if there is a reception while I am in Washington—& of course there will be, as I shall be there a week or more.1explanatory note I am mighty sorry you can’t go. Mrs. Howells ought to go now & not put ift off—invitations from Presidents are so kind of seldom, you know.2explanatory note
Ys Ever
Mark
Explanatory Notes
1 Clemens was planning a trip to Baltimore to attend the rehearsals for Ah Sin at Ford’s Opera House, where the play was scheduled to open after its week in Washington.
In the hope of securing an interview with President Hayes at the White House, he carried
a letter of introduction from Howells, which is not known to survive.
2 Hayes had recently invited the Howells family to visit him in the White House. Howells
replied on 9 April: “Elinor opened your letter, and read it aloud. The children were
all for starting at once to Washington. In the meantime we thank you cordially for
your kind invitation, and hope some time to profit by it” (Howells 1979a, 163–64). In late June 1877, the Howellses spent “a most exciting week” with Hayes
in Boston, and then in Newport. On 2 July Howells wrote his father, “I never saw so
popular a man, and I greatly admired the perfect taste and sense of all that he said
and did.— Probably we shall go to visit at the White House this winter or fall.” Although
he was unable to accept “five or six” more invitations later in the year, he and Elinor
did finally travel to Washington for a visit in May 1880 (Howells 1979a, 168, 179–80, 251).
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
- SLC (Samuel Langhorne Clemens). Ah Sin. Bret Harte, coauthor. Play written between October 1876 and February 1877. The only complete text is a prompt copy of 217 pages, in an unknown hand, at ViU[bib10492]. Published in SLC 1961[bib10456]. Twenty-seven MS pages of discarded dialogue, written by both Clemens and Harte, are also at ViU[bib10492]. 1876–77
- Howells, William Dean. W. D. Howells, Selected Letters, Volume 1: 1852–1872. Edited and annotated by George Arms, Richard H. Ballinger, Christoph K. Lohmann, and John K. Reeves. Textual editors Don L. Cook, Christoph K. Lohmann, and David Nordloh. Boston: Twayne Publishers. 1979
MS, correspondence card, in pencil, MH-H, shelf mark bMS Am 1784 (98).
MTHL , 1:174.
See Howells Letters in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.