31 May 1881 • Hartford, Conn. (MS, author’s copy: CU-MARK, UCCL 01964)
I know you cannot have read the letter, else in charity you would have suppressed it. If you will read it now, you will understand how little flattered a person who has never served a term in the penitentiary must feel nor in the idiot asylum must feel to be blandly charged with the authorship of so base & brainless & brutal a piece of literary shoemaker-work as the notorious Diamond-King hoax. I have never told a “magnificent lie” that cost anybody pain or a postage stamp.
Copy of Answer.
new page:
P. S.
I marvel much at this curious thing, for the name of the authors of that hoax is as familiar as the name of Washington. Still, there may even be people who have not heard of Washington
References
- University of California, Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library, Berkeley
- 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 Manuscript Letters Now in the Mark Twain Papers. Prepared by Anh Quynh Bui, Victor Fischer, Michael B. Frank, Robert H. Hirst, Lin Salamo, and Harriet Elinor Smith. 11 vols. Berkeley: The Bancroft Library. 2001
MS, author’s copy, CU-MARK.
MicroML, reel 4.
See Mark Twain Papers in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.