18 February 1873 • Hartford, Conn. (Transcript and MS: New York Tribune, 22 Feb 73, and DLC, UCCL 00874)
Mark Twain’s success, at Steinway Hall,1explanatory note has brought him any quantity of invitations to lecture, but his literary contracts confine him at home, &Ⓐemendation he will not be able to lecture any more this season.
Private:
Can you put the above in?2explanatory note I’m flooded—& Shanks & The Tribune are largely to blame for it!3explanatory note I want a chance to do something beside decline lecture invitations this year. I think I have had 20 from New York city alone. Come—put ◇ it the above paragraph (or the substance of it) in & make grateful,
letter docketed: 1873
See pp. 295–96.
Someone at the Tribune, possibly Reid, tore off the top portion of this letter and sent it to the newspaper’s composing room. That part of the original manuscript is not known to survive. The text is taken from the Tribune for 22 February, and therefore may not be a verbatim transcription of Clemens’s original words.
William Franklin Gore Shanks (1837–1905) had been the city editor of the Tribune since 1871. He began reporting for the Louisville Journal and Courier, and was a Civil War correspondent and then an editorial writer for the New York Herald. After working as the managing editor for Harper’s Weekly Magazine and then as city editor of the New York Times, he joined the Tribune staff in 1870 as a foreign correspondent. Clemens playfully blamed Shanks, whom he may have met at the Aldine dinner in February 1872, for so frequently printing his work in the Tribune (23 Feb 72 to Redpath, n. 1click to open link).
“Mark Twain’s success . . . ,” New York Tribune, 22 Feb 73, 6, is the source for the first three lines of the letter. Copy-text is a microfilm edition of the newspaper in the Newspaper and Microcopy Division, University of California, Berkeley (CU-NEWS). MS, Whitelaw Reid Papers, Library of Congress (DLC), is copy-text for the remainder of the letter.
L5 , 299–300.
The Whitelaw Reid Papers (part of the Papers of the Reid Family) were donated to DLC between 1953 and 1957 by Helen Rogers Reid (Mrs. Ogden Mills Reid).
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.
Tribune is copy-text for ‘Mark . . . season.’ (299.1–3)
MS is copy-text for ‘Private . . . 1873’ (300.1–12)