1 December 1870 • Buffalo, N.Y. (MS: MBAt, UCCL 07285)
I am sorry indeed that I did not see you, & glad, at the same time that you did not make the long trip out to my house & then fail, as—a thing apt to occur because folks are apt to come in the daytime & I don’t let anybody in, then! But I’m a sociable creature at night when work is done.
But work is piled on me in toppling pyramids, now—which figure represents a book which I am not getting out as fast as I ought—& I am obliged to say that I could not take half a column more on any terms. I would like exceedingly well to write for the Gazette (the only Weekly paper I ever wanted to own,) but as we steamboatmen used to say, “I’ve got my load.”1explanatory note
Warren Luther Brigham (1846–80) apparently began his journalistic career in 1867 with the Boston Saturday Evening Gazette, moved to the Boston Advertiser in 1868, then to the Boston Courier in the summer of 1870, and was again with the Gazette when he wrote Clemens in November. The Gazette, founded in 1814, was “an excellent paper of its kind, with its theatrical and other reviews, its amusing tales, its humor, and its ‘lighter gossip of Boston life’” and its penchant for “racy western material” (Mott 1938, 35, 121; Lisa Backman, personal communication; Boston Directory: 1870, 111; 1871, 115).
References
- Boston Athenaeum, Boston, 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
- SLC (Samuel Langhorne Clemens). Mark Twain’s Letters, Volume 4: 1870–1871. Edited by Victor Fischer, Michael B. Frank, and Lin Salamo. The Mark Twain Papers. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Also online at MTPO[bib32371]. 1995
- Mott, Frank Luther. A History of American Magazines, 1850–1865. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1938
MS, Boston Athenaeum, Boston (MBAt).
L4 , 254–255.
donated to MBAt on 5 March 1982 by Dorothy Webling (Mrs. Benjamin T.) Stephenson, Brigham’s granddaughter.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.