21 August 1869 • Buffalo, N.Y. (MS: ViU, UCCL 00338)
I did hope to lecture for you, but I can’t.1explanatory note I am sorry, but the thing can’t be helped. I have already taken a newspaper & am going to take a wife—& that s is enough to look after for the present. I am under contract to lecture in New England, but have written to-dayⒶemendation to ask to be exp excusedⒶemendation, & no doubt I shall be.2explanatory note
Have heard from Kingston,3explanatory note but cannot talk there either.
Crane (1838–1927), a bookkeeper, had been (and probably still was) secretary of the Lincoln Literary Association, of Rondout, New York, for which Clemens had delivered his “American Vandal Abroad” lecture on 2 December 1868 (Ulster County Directory, 239; Crane family monument, Montrepose Cemetery, Kingston, N. Y., information courtesy of Amanda C. Jones; L2 , 47–48, 247 n. 3, 262).
Clemens had already written James Redpath on 14 August to “beg off.” Redpath’s response, now lost, must have urged him to reconsider. Clemens’s letter of 21 August, doubtless more emphatic, is not known to survive.
See the previous letter.
MS, Clifton Waller Barrett Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville (ViU).
L3 , 315–316; Collector (October 1948), lot M 1956, excerpt.
sold by Walter R. Benjamin Autographs in 1948; deposited at ViU by Clifton Waller Barrett on 17 December 1963.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.