The sustained and intensive editorial labor necessary for this volume was made possible by the generous support of the American taxpayer, and by the professional encouragement of scholars who recommended funding for successive grants to the Mark Twain Project from the National Endowment for the Humanities, an independent federal agency. The University of California Press was likewise assisted in meeting production costs by a grant from the Endowment. We are grateful for this intellectual and material support, part of which the Endowment was able to grant by matching, dollar for dollar, a major contribution to The Friends of The Bancroft Library from Jane Newhall.

In addition, many individual and institutional donors contributed funds that have been matched by the Endowment in its continuing support of the Mark Twain Project, especially during the last ten years. We are grateful to the Alcoa Foundation; Mrs. Kurt E. Appert; the Belvedere Scientific Fund; Stanley J. Bernhard; The House of Bernstein, Inc.; the Edmund G. and Bernice Brown Fund; the Louise M. Davies Foundation; Frances K. and Theodore H. Geballe; Richard and Rhoda Goldman; the Estate of Helen R. Goss; the Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr., Fund; the Crescent Porter Hale Foundation; Constance Crowley Hart; the William Randolph Hearst Foundation; the Hedco Foundation; the Heller Charitable and Educational Fund; Clarence E. Heller; Mrs. Edward H. Heller; the Flora Lamson Hewlett Memorial Fund; Dr. Myra Karstadt; the Koret Foundation; Daniel E. Koshland, Jr.; Theodore H. Koundakjian; the Mark Twain Foundation; the Charles E. Merrill Trust; the New York Community Trust; the Pareto Fund; the Estate of Helen F. Pierce; William M. Roth; the San Francisco Foundation; the L. J. Skaggs and Mary C. Skaggs Foundation; Marion B. and Willis S. Slusser; the Henry Nash Smith Memorial Fund; the Marshall Steel, Sr., Foundation; the Thomas More Storke Fund; Mrs. Calvin K. Townsend; Tomas S. Vanasek; and the Wells Fargo Foundation.

The Mark Twain Committee of the Council of The Friends of The Bancroft Library is chiefly responsible for encouraging these and other private donors to lend their support to the ongoing editorial work of the Project. Our thanks go to the present and former members of this committee: John W. Rosston and Willis S. Slusser, co-chairmen; Henry K. Evers, Stephen G. Herrick, and David J. McDaniel, former chairmen; William P. Barlow, Jr., Henry M. Bowles, Launce E. Gamble, Marion S. Goodin, James C. Greene, Constance Crowley Hart, James D. Hart, Roger W. Heyns, Kenneth E. Hill, James E. O’Brien, Joseph A. Rosenthal, Herbert E. Stansbury, Jr., and Norman H. Strouse, as well as Kimberley L. Massingale, secretary to the Council.

Several generations of scholars have done pioneering work in locating, collecting, and publishing Mark Twain’s letters. We are indebted to all of them, particularly to Albert Bigelow Paine and his successors as Editor of the Mark Twain Papers: Bernard DeVoto, Dixon Wecter, Henry Nash Smith, and Frederick Anderson. Paine’s Mark Twain: A Biography (1912) and Mark Twain’s Letters (1917) are indispensable to the present undertaking, and are the sole source now known for some letters collected here. Wecter’s Mark Twain to Mrs. Fairbanks (1949) and The Love Letters of Mark Twain (1949) were the first to publish Mark Twain’s letters in accord with contemporary scholarly standards, in both their annotation and their transcriptions of the letters themselves. Henry Nash Smith and William M. Gibson’s Mark Twain–Howells Letters (1960) likewise established a new and higher standard for publication of letters. Anderson assisted Smith and Gibson on that publication and, until his death in 1979, was responsible for the Mark Twain Papers series, which included among its first volumes Hamlin Hill’s Mark Twain’s Letters to His Publishers: 1867–1894. We have profited from these pioneering efforts in ways too numerous to bear mention in the notes.

Editing Mark Twain’s letters has required continuing and demanding assistance with the ongoing research. For valuable aid over many years we are grateful to the staff of The Bancroft Library, especially Brenda J. Bailey, Anthony S. Bliss, Peter E. Hanff, Irene M. Moran, and William M. Roberts. Special thanks go to Rhio Barnhart and his colleagues at the Interlibrary Borrowing Service in the Main Library: Robert Heyer, Leon Megrian, Jo Lynn Milardovich, Kathleen Messer, and Helen Ram. Their enthusiastic and untiring efforts located many rare and valuable resources that have notably enriched the annotation. We are similarly indebted to Philip Hoehn of the Map Room and Daniel L. Johnston of the Photographic Service in the Main Library for patient assistance with their special expertise.

The Mark Twain Papers in The Bancroft Library is the largest archive of the original letters published in this volume; this collection of Mark Twain’s own private papers was brought to the University of California in 1949 through the persuasive powers of Dixon Wecter and the generosity of Clara Clemens Samossoud. Two additional archives are the primary sources of manuscript letters in this volume: the Jean Webster McKinney Family Papers in the Vassar College Library, Poughkeepsie, New York; and The Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California. We would like to thank the staff at the Vassar College Library, who since 1977 have generously provided us with access to their Mark Twain materials and graciously answered our repeated requests for supporting documentation: Frances Goudy, Barbara LaMont, Nancy S. MacKechnie, Eleanor Rogers, and, above all, Lisa Browar (now Assistant Director for Rare Books and Manuscripts at the New York Public Library). At the Huntington, we received timely and expert assistance from Sara S. Hodson and David Michael Hamilton. We are grateful for the unfailing cooperation of all the other libraries that own letters published in this volume. In particular, we have benefited from the generous assistance of Julius P. Barclay, Joan Crane, and Michael Plunkett of the University of Virginia Library; Rosanne M. Barker and Elizabeth Witherell of the University of California Library in Santa Barbara; Carol Beales and Richard Reilly of The James S. Copley Library in La Jolla, California; and Radley H. Daly of the Scroll and Key Society, as well as Daria Ague, Donald Gallup, and Patricia C. Willis of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, at Yale University. We are likewise grateful to Todd M. Axelrod, Mrs. Robin Craven, Robert Daley, and Victor and Irene Murr Jacobs, who generously made accessible to us the letters in their collections. Special thanks are due to Mrs. Theodore Whitfield for permission to reproduce some of the photographs collected on the Quaker City excursion by her ancestor and Mark Twain’s traveling companion, Colonel William R. Denny. Special thanks go likewise to William P. Barlow, Jr., whose uniquely comprehensive collection of auction catalogs afforded us the opportunity for an unusually thorough search for letters not known to survive elsewhere.

In the course of transcribing, annotating, and tracing the provenance of these letters we received invaluable assistance from the following, who have our thanks: Donald Anderle, Lisa Browar, and Valerie Wingfield of the New York Public Library, which kindly granted us permission to reproduce a Tribune Association check from “Personal Miscellaneous. Samuel Clemens”; Pat Akre of the San Francisco Public Library; Frank J. Carroll and James H. Hutson of the Library of Congress; Sandra Cronkhite, Historian of the Village of Fort Plain, New York; Marianne J. Curling, Diana Royce, and Laura Vassell of the Mark Twain Memorial in Hartford; Mrs. H. Dale Green of the Chenango County (New York) Historical Society; Jean Montgomery Johnson and Philip A. Metzger of Lehigh University Libraries; Jean Rainwater of Brown University Library; Ann K. Sindelar of the Western Reserve Historical Society in Cleveland; Lola Szladits of the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection in the New York Public Library; Joan L. Sorger of the Cleveland Public Library; Gordon Struble of the Patten Free Library in Bath, Maine; and Herbert A. Wisbey, Jr., of the Elmira College Center for Mark Twain Studies at Quarry Farm. We also thank the following for their assistance with specific problems of transcription and annotation: Guido Carboni of Turin, Italy; Leon T. Dickinson; John E. Duncan; Michael Fahy; Wilson H. Faude; Alan Gribben; Hamlin Hill; Holger Kersten of Kiel, West Germany; M. A. Khouri and Muhammad Siddiq; Jervis Langdon, Jr.; Horace Levy; Coralee Paull; and Mary N. Shelnutt. Throughout the process of design and typesetting for this volume we have had expert assistance from several people at the University of California Press: Fran Mitchell, who patiently guided the book through the production process; Albert Burkhardt, who developed the design of the book; and Sandy Drooker, who created the dust jacket and acted as a consultant in other design matters. Our typesetters, Wilsted & Taylor Publishing Services, Oakland, California, provided patient, knowledgeable help in developing the typographical aspect of the transcription system used to represent the texts of Mark Twain’s letters. In addition to Christine Taylor and LeRoy Wilsted, we are indebted to Burwell Davis for his meticulous care and remarkable accuracy in setting the book into type. He was ably assisted by Michelle Elkin, Nancy Evans, Mark LaFlaur, Matthew Lasar, Rosemary Northcraft, Vivian Scholl, Jan Seymour-Ford, Fronia Simpson, Mary VanClay, and Sherwood Williams. Paul DeFrates and Allen McKinney of Graphic Impressions, Emeryville, California, provided excellent photographs for the illustrations and manuscript reproductions. Don L. Cook provided a perceptive and helpful inspection of the volume for the Modern Language Association’s Committee on Scholarly Editions, which granted the volume its seal of approval in 1989.

Finally, we wish to thank our colleagues at the Mark Twain Project for generous, enthusiastic, and always expert assistance. We have profited from their advice in the several areas of special knowledge about everything from Mark Twain to the details of bookmaking. In a tradition that now stretches back twenty years into the past, they willingly shared the burdens of checking, collating, and proofreading. Dahlia Armon prepared the genealogies of the Clemens and Langdon families—the most complete now available—and shared her research on Mark Twain’s 1868–69 lecture tour. Robert Pack Browning provided careful readings of transcriptions for letters now owned by individuals or libraries in Indiana, Ohio, New York, and several other states. Victor Fischer offered patient and exceptionally helpful advice about every stage of the editorial work, as well as his special knowledge of typography and design during the production process. Michael B. Frank’s informed and judicious criticism of the annotation was invaluable. Kenneth M. Sanderson substantially improved the accuracy and clarity of the notes, and freely lent his special expertise with Mark Twain’s handwriting to establishment of the letter texts. The Union Catalog of Clemens Letters (1986), edited by our former colleague Paul Machlis, was indispensable to the orderly preparation of this volume, as it will be for all subsequent volumes. Beth Bernstein performed essential research on the illustrations and contributed significantly to the discussion and resolution of textual problems. We offer our special thanks to Janice Braun for her expertise in locating rare research materials. Several other students—Scott Bean, Michele Hammond, Amy Michiko Horlings, Patrick Kingsbury, Esther Ma, Craig Stein, Deborah Ann Turner, and William R. Winn—gave generous support and aid in a variety of clerical and editorial tasks, greatly facilitating our work. We wish to thank our administrative assistant, Sunny Gottberg, who takes care of office business with persistence, resourcefulness, and patience. These colleagues and friends have made the task of editing Mark Twain’s letters a congenial and rewarding experience.

H.E.S.   R.B.   L.S.