1881] The year should be 1882: see the note at 70.19–37.

Howells] William Dean Howells (1837–1920) was born at Martin’s Ferry, Ohio, into a large family with radical political and religious tendencies. He was apprenticed to his father, a printer, and became a journalist. With, as he was to say, “an almost entire want of schooling,” he read widely in his father’s library, teaching himself Spanish, German, French, and Italian (Howells to John S. Hart, 2 July 1871, in Howells 1979, 375). In recognition of his support of Lincoln’s 1860 presidential campaign, Howells was rewarded with a consulship in Venice (1861). Returning to America in 1865, he rose as a journalist, moving to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to be assistant editor (1866–71) and then editor (1871–81) of the Atlantic Monthly. In 1881 he retired to concentrate on writing. Among his personal friends were Henry Adams, William and Henry James, and jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (son of the poet). His friendship with Clemens dates from his review of The Innocents Abroad in 1869 (Howells 1869). Howells used his position at the epicenter of American letters to help assure Mark Twain’s literary success; he also served his friend as editor, proofreader, and sounding-board. In literature, Howells championed and practiced realism. His best novels, out of a vast output, are usually considered to be The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) and A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890); he memorialized Clemens in My Mark Twain (1910).

his old father . . . resigned, a couple of years later] Howells’s father, William Cooper Howells (1807–94), was appointed U.S. consul at Toronto in 1878, after serving for four years as the consul at Quebec. Howells learned in late January 1882 that his father might lose his position, and on 2 March wrote him that he planned “to spend Sunday with Mark Twain who is a great friend of Grant’s, and can possibly get me access to him” (Howells to [begin page 476] William C. Howells, 2 Mar 1882, in Howells 1980, 10–11). Clemens and Howells called on Grant in New York on 10 March. In My Mark Twain, Howells reported that Grant was “very simple and very cordial, and I was instantly the more at home with him, because his voice was the soft, rounded, Ohio River accent to which my years [i.e., ears] were earliest used from my steamboating uncles, my earliest heroes. When I stated my business he merely said, Oh no; that must not be; he would write to Mr. Arthur” (Howells 1910, 71). Grant acted so promptly that Secretary of State Frederick T. Frelinghuysen (1817–85) responded the following day, “You may inform Mr. Clemens that it is not our purpose to make a change in the Consulate at Toronto” (Frelinghuysen to Grant, 11 Mar 1882, CU-MARK). Grant forwarded the letter to Clemens, and he in turn wrote Howells, on 14 March, “This settles the matter—at least for some time to come—& permanently, I imagine. You see the General is a pretty prompt man” (MH-H, in MTHL, 1:394). The elder Howells resigned his post in June 1883 (21 June 1874 to Howells, L6, 166 n. 2; Howells 1979, 61, 196; Howells 1980, 10–11, 14, 58–59).

“How he sits and towers” . . . Dante] Howells quoted this phrase in a letter to Clemens from Bethlehem, New Hampshire, of 9 August 1885: “We had a funeral service for Grant, here, yesterday, and all the time while they were pumping song and praise over his great memory, I kept thinking of the day when we lunched on pork and beans with him in New York, and longing to make them feel and see how far above their hymns he was even in such an association. How he ‘sits and towers’ as Dante says” (CU-MARK, in MTHL, 2:536). Less than a month later, on 10 September, Clemens added this quotation to his dictated typescript, inserting in brackets the words “It was bacon and beans” and Howells’s presumed quote from Dante. The phrase is not, however, from Dante, but from a sonnet by Italian dramatist and poet Vittorio Alfieri (1749–1803): “Siena, dal colle ove torreggia e siede” (“Siena, from the hill where she towers and sits”). Howells’s source was E. A. Brigidi’s La Nuova Guida di Siena (a work he drew on for his Tuscan Cities), where it appeared without citation (Brigidi 1885, 11; Howells 1886, 126, 139). Many years later Howells recalled that the “baked beans and coffee were of about the railroad-refreshment quality; but eating them with Grant was like sitting down to baked beans and coffee with Julius Caesar, or Alexander, or some other great Plutarchan captain” (Howells 1910, 72).

“Squibob” Derby at West Point . . . would change places with him] Howells later recalled:

George Horatio Derby (1823–61), a captain in the U.S. Army Corps of Topographical Engineers, was known primarily for the humorous sketches he wrote under his pseudonym while stationed on the Pacific Coast. These were collected in Phoenixiana; or, Sketches and Burlesques (1856) and, posthumously, The Squibob Papers (1865) (15 Dec 1866 to JLC and family, L1, 374 n. 2).

General Badeau’s military history . . . John Russell Young’s account . . . had hardly any sale at all] Adam Badeau (1831–95) became Grant’s military secretary in 1864, and by the time he retired from the army in 1869 (with the brevet rank of brigadier general) the two men had become close friends. President Grant appointed Badeau U.S. consul in London, where he served from 1870 to 1881, except for a leave from his post to travel with Grant for the first five months of his 1877–79 world tour. Between 1868 and 1881 Badeau published his three-volume Military History of Ulysses S. Grant (Badeau 1868–81; N&J3, 107 n. 137; 15 June 1873 to Badeau, L5, 382 n. 1). John Russell Young (1840–99) had a distinguished career as a journalist with several newspapers before becoming managing editor of the New York Tribune from 1866 to 1869. In 1872 he accepted a position as foreign correspondent for the New York Herald. He accompanied Grant on his tour, which he chronicled in Around the World with General Grant (1879). Appointed by President Chester A. Arthur as U.S. minister to China in 1882 (through Grant’s influence), Young mediated a number of disputes involving the United States, China, and France before returning to the Herald in 1885 (14 May 1869 to OLL, L3, 230 n. 6; 17 or 18 June 1873 to Young, L5, 383 n. 1).

best plan of publication—the subscription plan] Subscription publishers sold books in advance of publication through agents who went door to door, largely in rural areas, and persuaded people to place orders by showing them a bound “prospectus” with sample pages and illustrations. Subscription books typically cost more than those sold in bookstores, and were the best way to ensure high profits—a lesson that Clemens had learned from his own experience, beginning in 1869 with the American Publishing Company.

American Publishing Company . . . swindling me for ten years] In early 1872, shortly after the publication of Roughing It, Clemens began to suspect that his publisher, Elisha P. Bliss, Jr., of the American Publishing Company, was cheating him by overstating his production expenses. He was reassured by Bliss’s explanation, however, and stayed with the firm through the publication of A Tramp Abroad in 1880 (see RI 1993, 877–80; AD, 21 Feb 1906, note at 370.32–33). Although after Bliss’s death in 1880 Clemens considered suing the company, he decided that Francis Bliss, who had succeeded his father, had treated him fairly (26 Oct 1881 to Webster, NPV, in MTBus, 173–74; 28 Dec 1881 to Osgood and Company and 31 Dec 1881 to Osgood, MH-H, in MTLP, 147–49; 3? Oct 1882 to Elliott, CU-MARK; 6 Oct 1882 to Webster, NPV, in MTBus, 203–4). By mid-1883 he was willing to recommend the firm to fellow author George Washington Cable: