To
Olivia L. Clemens
11 March 1877 • Boston, Mass. (MS, correspondence card in pencil: Christie’s,
New York, December 1991, UCCL 02863)
11 March 1877 • Boston, Mass. (MS, correspondence card in pencil: Christie’s,
New York, December 1991, UCCL 02863)
Howells’s 5
Sunday.
slcLivy darling, we perplexed ourselves all day yesterday over plots & counter plots, & dreamed over them all night. Unsatisfactory. We drop back, now, to the original proposition—Howells to write the play, dropping in the skeleton of Orm’s speeches, I to take him, later, & fill him out.1explanatory note I expect to remain at Parker’s in Boston, tomorrow & return home Tuesday. I love you my darling.
Saml
Mrs. Samℓ. L. Clemens | Hartford | Conn return address: the atlantic monthly the riverside press, cambridge, mass. postmarked boston mass. mar 11
Explanatory Notes
1 Clemens traveled to Boston and Cambridge sometime around 9 March, staying at the Parker
House, evidently returning to Hartford on 13 March. The goal of this trip was to confer
with Howells on the plan of a collaborative play entitled Orme’s Motor. Originally featuring a feckless inventor (to be based on Orion Clemens), the play
was several times discussed and replanned over the next few years, eventually becoming
Colonel Sellers as a Scientist (SLC 1883b). That play, written in 1883, was withdrawn while in production in 1886 (for a discussion
and a text of it, see Howells 1960, 205–41). It served as the basis of Clemens’s 1892 novel The American Claimant (1892).
References
- Christie, Manson and Woods International, New York City
- 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- Microfilm Edition of Mark Twain’s Previously Unpublished Letters.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
- SLC (Samuel Langhorne Clemens). Colonel Sellers As a Scientist. William Dean Howells, coauthor. Play written primarily between October and December 1883. MS of 425 pages, CU-MARK; complete TS, CtY-BR; partial TS, ViU. Published in Howells 1960[bib01013], 205–41. 1883
- Howells, William Dean. The Complete Plays of W. D. Howells. Edited by Walter J. Meserve. Under the general editorship of William M. Gibson and George Arms. New York: New York University Press. 1960
- SLC (Samuel Langhorne Clemens). The American Claimant. New York: Charles L. Webster and Co. 1892
MS, correspondence card, in pencil, seen at Christie’s, New York, while awaiting sale in December 1991.
Christie’s catalog, sale of 5 December 1991, lot 193, partial publication. The catalog misdates the envelope postmark 1886; MicroPUL, reel 1.
Chester L. Davis, Sr., probably acquired the MS from Clara Clemens Samossoud sometime between 1949 and 1962 (see Samossoud Collection in Description of Provenanceclick to open link). After his death in 1987, the MS was owned by Chester L. Davis, Jr., who sold it through Christie’s in December 1991.