Transcriptions
MTPO Doc Ed “What I Was at 19–20”
(June–July 1855) Show Headnote Samuel Clemens' forty-nine surviving notebooks had their genesis in a small account ledger which originally was intended to serve as a French lesson copybook. This first notebook presents evidence that the nineteen-year-old printer was learning chess as well as French, reading a book on phrenology, examining a theological controversy, and assisting in his family's business affairs.
MTPO Doc Ed II “Get a Little Memorandum-Book”
(March–July 1857) Show Headnote 2026 Headnote: This digital edition of Notebook 2, the earliest known notebook from Clemens’s years as a cub pilot on Mississippi River steamboats, supersedes the narrative essay on Notebook 2 that appeared in place of a complete transcription in the 1975 print edition of Mark Twain's Notebooks & Journals, Volume 1 (henceforth N&J1). The current edition provides a complete transcription of the document with Mississippi River landmark identifications and a corrected date.
MTPO Doc Ed III “A Pilot Now, Full Fledged”
(November 1860–March 1861) Show Headnote Notebook 3 Headnote Addendum (2025) The editors of Mark Twain’s Notebooks and Journals, Volume 1 (1975) did not publish a full transcription of Notebook 3. Instead, they provided a narrative of Clemens’s use of the notebook with a summary of its contents, accompanied by transcribed excerpts. The editorial summary of Notebook 3 contains valuable context, so it is provided below this note.
MTPO Doc Ed [MTP: N&J1_63] IV “By Way of Angel's . . . to Jackass Hill”
(January–February 1865) expand headnote There is a gap of four years between Notebooks 3 and 4, a period for which no notebooks are known to exist. Following his experience as a Mississippi River pilot, Clemens helped form the Marion Rangers in the summer of 1861, after the outbreak of the Civil War.
MTPO Doc Ed V “Drifting About the Outskirts of the World”
(March, June–September 1866) Show Headnote [MTP: N&J1_91] There is an interval of slightly more than a year, from the end of February 1865 to the beginning of March 1866, between Notebooks 4 and 5. Mark Twain thought this period worthy of only a single paragraph in chapter 62 of Roughing It: After a three months' absence, I found myself in San Francisco again, without a cent.
MTPO Doc Ed VI “The Loveliest Fleet of Islands”
(March–April 1866) expand headnote Notebooks 5 and 6 were used in overlapping fashion, and the problems of their dating and their relation to each other are fully discussed in the headnote to Notebook 5.
Approximately one-quarter of Notebook 6 is devoted to the Ajax voyage to Hawaii and includes Mark Twain's notes about the ship and its officers, comments about his fellow passengers, and the Hawaiian information he solicited from them.
MTPO Doc Ed VII “A Doomed Voyage”
(December 1866–January 1867) expand headnote On 15 december 1866, Mark Twain sailed from San Francisco on the North American Steamship Company's “opposition” steamer America, bound for New York via Nicaragua, “leaving more friends behind me than any newspaper man that ever sailed out of the Golden Gate” (SLC to “Dear Folks,” MTBus , p. 89). Notebook 7 is his record of this journey.
MTPO Doc Ed VIII “The Great Pleasure Excursion to Europe and the Holy Land”
(May–July 1867) Show Headnote Notebook 8 was evidently begun in mid-May 1867, less than three weeks before Clemens sailed in the Quaker City for Europe and the Holy Land. It is the first of three surviving Quaker City notebooks and contains notes that Clemens made primarily for his letters to the San Francisco Alta California, and so by extension for his first major book, The Innocents Abroad.
MTPO Doc Ed IX “A Funeral Excursion Without a Corpse”
(11 August–11 October 1867) Show Headnote The last dated entry in Notebook 8 (2 July 1867) left Clemens at sea, bound for Marseilles, while the entry bearing the earliest date in Notebook 9 (11 August 1867) marks his departure from the harbor of Naples. A notebook was certainly kept for the intervening period, but no evidence refutes Paine’s surmise that the “notes of this period are lost.