This volume opens with an 1853 letter in which a brash, seventeen-year-old journeyman typesetter, writing from New York City, gives his mother an account of some of his activities since his recent unexpected departure from their home in Hannibal, Missouri. It closes with an 1866 letter in which an established thirty-one-year-old journalist, writing from San Francisco on the eve of returning home for the first time in six years, shares with his mother his gratification in the wide recognition and acquaintance he has achieved.

In the interval between these letters Samuel L. Clemens had lived a footloose existence, restlessly sampling a variety of companions, places, and occupations. Between 1853 and 1857, while an itinerant printer seeking employment and amusement in St. Louis, New York, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Muscatine and Keokuk, Iowa, and Cincinnati, he had tried his hand as a travel correspondent for his older brother Orion’s struggling village newspapers, the Hannibal Journal and later the Muscatine Journal, and, under the pseudonym Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass, experimented with comic letters to the Keokuk Post. In 1857 he set off to make his fortune in Brazil, but got only as far as New Orleans before deciding instead to become an apprentice pilot on the Mississippi River. He was a Mississippi steersman and pilot, and an occasional contributor to newspapers in St. Louis and New Orleans, until the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861. In the summer of 1861, after a farcical two weeks as a Confederate irregular, he went west with Orion, then the newly appointed secretary of Nevada Territory, expecting to be gone for three months. He remained in Nevada for nearly three years, however, during which time he was a clerk for the territorial legislature, a gold and silver miner, a laborer in a quartz mill, an irrepressible speculator in mining stock, a notary public, and, as Mark Twain, a boisterously inventive, controversial, and highly visible local reporter and editor for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. In 1864—after his published affront to the women of Carson City and his quarrel in print with one of the proprietors of the rival Virginia City Union almost resulted in duels—he moved to San Francisco. He spent most of the next two and a half years there, earning a precarious living and honing his rambunctious personal and journalistic style as a reporter and writer for several papers, principally the Morning Call, a popular daily, and the Californian, a literary weekly. At the end of 1864 he escaped hard times by retreating to rustic Tuolumne and Calaveras counties, where he did some pocket mining when not passing the time exchanging tall tales with garrulous miners and local residents. He used some of this material in sketches for the Californian upon his return to San Francisco in early 1865. Eastern reprintings of Clemens’s Californian pieces paid him nothing, but won unanticipated praise in New York City, as did a story he published virtually by accident in the New York Saturday Press in November 1865, “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog.” By late 1865 Clemens had come to rely for his income on his post as San Francisco correspondent of the Territorial Enterprise, a daily grind that, in early 1866, gave way to an idyllic four months as Hawaiian correspondent of the Sacramento Union. In the fall of that year, encouraged by San Francisco friends, he delivered a lecture based on his Hawaiian experiences. Making the most of its success, he took to the road, performing in the towns of northern California and western Nevada. This tour, a forerunner of the more extensive ones he was to make in the years to come, confirmed his status as a local celebrity. By December 1866 he could confidently exult in his sense of accomplishment and in a secure source of income as he prepared to sail for New York with a new commission as roving correspondent for the San Francisco Alta California.

The transformation of the cocksure but callow printer of 1853 into the worldly journalist and public figure of 1866 is vividly and reliably documented in the letters gathered here, the only ones known to survive for the period. They demonstrate the profound degree to which, in Clemens’s case, the boy was father to the man. The earliest letters—even when padded, for the benefit of Orion Clemens’s newspaper readers, with borrowings from other papers and from guidebooks—evidence the ready humor, the sure command of colloquial speech, and the keen eye for detail that characterize Mark Twain’s best writing. In his mature work—especially Roughing It (1872), Life on the Mississippi (1883), and the Autobiographical Dictations that occupied him in his last years—Clemens returned to the material he first recorded in these letters to his family and friends. The letters, however, preserve this matter in its least self-conscious, unelaborated, and, often, most affecting form. Clemens’s description in his 18 June 1858 letter to his sister-in-law, Mollie Clemens, of his younger brother Henry’s sufferings and his own guilt-ridden remorse after the explosion of the steamer Pennsylvania is hardly less moving now than it must have been then. His Nevada letters, recording his determined acceptance of harsh living conditions and the backbreaking labor that might make him rich, manifest the entrepreneurial ambition that throughout his life co-existed, and sometimes interfered, with his literary impulse. Clemens’s mercurial temperament is apparent here not only in his waxing and waning hopes as a miner, but also in his vacillation over commitment to the literary career that, in retrospect, seemed inevitable even to him. In October 1865, driven and despondent, he writes to Orion and Mollie Clemens, belittling his “‘call’ to literature of a low order—i.e. humorous,” but resigning himself to “excite the laughter of God’s creatures” and thereby strive for an “unworthy & evanescent” fame. Nevertheless, just three months later, he is comfortable enough with this calling to send his mother and sister favorable notices of his work and reel off an ambitious array of literary projects, among them a book along the lines of Life on the Mississippi. In short, the youth Samuel Clemens was, and the man he became and remained, are captured in the letters published in this volume, more than forty of them for the first time. They present the most complete and intimate documentary account now available for this critical period in his life.