20 December 1877 • Hartford, Conn. (MS, correspondence card, in pencil: ViU, UCCL 01513)
Dr Sir: IⒶemendation thank you very much for your courtesy. Several oth of the pieces are familiar to me, & I shall be glad to make the acquaintance of the rest.1explanatory note
Chas. F. Adams, Esq | 105 Arch st | Boston in upper left corner: Personal | flourish return address: if not delivered within 10 days, to be returned to postmarked: hartford conn. dec 20 6pm docketed: Mark Twain
Charles Follen Adams (1842–1918) fought in the Civil War, and was wounded and taken prisoner at Gettysburg. In 1872 he began to contribute humorous poems in a German or Pennsylvania Dutch dialect to periodicals. Clemens here responded to a gift from Adams, announced in the following letter (CU-MARK):
Adams enclosed his business card: “Adams & Cary, Importers and Manufacturers of Real Hair Goods, Hair Dealers’ Supplies, Fancy Goods, Jewelry, Millinery Ornaments, &c.” On the envelope of his letter, Clemens wrote, “Adams, the new humorist.” The gift copy of Leedle Yawcob Strauss was still in Clemens’s library at his death (Gribben 1980, 1:7). In his autobiography he included Adams among the humorists “whose writings and sayings were once in everybody’s mouth but are now heard of no more, and are no longer mentioned” (AutoMT2, 153, 534).
References
- University of Virginia, Charlottesville.
- 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
- Microfilm Edition of Mark Twain’s Previously Unpublished Letters. Prepared by Anh Quynh Bui, Victor Fischer, Michael B. Frank, Robert H. Hirst, Lin Salamo, and Harriet Elinor Smith. 8 vols. Berkeley: The Bancroft Library. 2001
- University of California, Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library, Berkeley
- Gribben, Alan. Mark Twain’s Library: A Reconstruction. 2 vols. Boston: G. K. Hall and Co. 1980
- SLC (Samuel Langhorne Clemens). Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 2. Edited by Benjamin Griffin, Harriet Elinor Smith, Victor Fischer, Michael B. Frank, Sharon K. Goetz, and Leslie Diane Myrick. The Mark Twain Papers. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Also online at MTPO[bib32371]. 2013
MS, correspondence card, in pencil, Clifton Waller Barrett Library, Alderman Library, ViU.
MicroPUL, reel 1.
Deposited at ViU by Clifton Waller Barrett on 17 December 1963.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.