21 May 1870 • Buffalo, N.Y. (MS, damage emended: Axelrod and ODaU, UCCL 00466)
You are the infernallest pleaseantest scribbler that lives. I want to say that & clinch it, before I proceed to business.
No sir—I won’t lecture for a level year from this day & date.1explanatory note The very best lecture manager in America without any exception will pay me five thousand dollars a month, one half in advance, to talk for him. & the other payments daily or weekly, as I chose, (just note the grammatical flourishes, as you go along)—& I had the nerve to refuse!2explanatory note Therefore, Ⓐemendation seal thy lips upon the good old lectureing business, for there is hardly enough money in America to coax the subscriber on to the platform. Avaunt & quit me sight!
Now look here—why did n’t you know enough to send me name & address of the hound who announces “Mark Twain’s New Papers”3explanatory note—or did you want to go there & eat him yourself? Go straight & get his name & number—& show him this letter n Ⓐemendation & notify the son of a prostitute to take in that sign.
Watch “John Quill, .” & just haze him once He will probably know enough to not let on that he is the party I am refer to.4explanatory note
No—I don’t write for anything but Express & Galaxy—& publish books nowhere outside of Hartford. Oh, I’ll make him that “New Papers” man famous! Hurry & send me his name & address so that I can publish him.
Have ordered our Weekly sent regularly to—
“Gov. Frank Fuller,
Girard House, Phila.”
You can stand it, I know, for I shan’t write for it very often.
Well I would like to see you, you stately old fool!
If she miscarries, please return to “Mark Twain,” Buffalo.
{Extra stamps on the other side may Ⓐemendation be sent to the Conscience Fund, to pay Ⓐemendation for all these outside remarks.}Ⓐemendation.
Personal,
Private &
Confidential Ⓐemendation
cross-written: Send me a copy of that thief’s advertisement, Frank, so that I shall have documentary evidence against him.
Gov. Frank Fuller
Girard House
Philadelphia.
postmarked: buffalo n.y. may 21
Clemens’s resolve wavered in October, but he did not return to the lecture circuit until October 1871 (9 Oct 70 to Redpathclick to open link; 10 June 71 to Redpath and Fallclick to open link; 16 Oct 71 to OLCclick to open link).
These terms greatly exceed Clemens’s usual fee of $75 or $100 per lecture. The offer may have come from Thomas B. Pugh, manager of the Star Course of Lectures and Concerts in Philadelphia, for on 5 July the Washington correspondent of the Sacramento Union interviewed Clemens and reported that he had
given up lecturing for the present, although overrun with offers. I suppose you have known that $50 per night are the usual terms of ordinary lecturers. Those of the “upper crust” get $100 a night. But Philadelphia recently offered our California humorist $225 a night for any reasonable number of nights! (“Letter from Washington,” Sacramento Union, 19 July 70, 1)
In 1871 Pugh paid Clemens $250 for a single lecture in Philadelphia (11 Mar 70 to Church, n. 2click to open link; 14 Nov 70 to Pugh, n. 1click to open link; 10 June 71 to Redpath and Fall, n. 4click to open link).
Unidentified.
MS of letter, collection of Todd M. Axelrod; MS of envelope, collection of Victor and Irene Murr Jacobs, Roesch Library, University of Dayton (ODaU). The envelope is torn, obliterating a few words, characters, and punctuation marks. See the illustration below, editorially reconstructed.
L4 , 133–135; letter only, AAA 1924, lot 66, excerpt; Anderson Galleries 1928, lot 55, brief paraphrase.
The letter MS was sold in 1924 by an unidentified owner, possibly a “Prominent Pennsylvania Collector”; in 1928 it was sold again in the liquidation sale of the George D. Smith Book Company. Probably between 1936 and 1942 George Brownell saw either the MS or a lost transcription of it and made the typescript now at WU (see Brownell Collection in Description of Provenance). The MS was acquired by Axelrod in 1983. There is no known record of the envelope before it became part of the Jacobs Collection, where it has remained at least since 1981.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.