8 April 1874 • Hartford, Conn. (MS: MB UCCL 01072)
“Dod Grile” (Mr. Bierce) is a personal friend of mine, & I like him exceedingly—but he knows my opinion of the “Nuggets & Dust,” & so I do not mind exposing it to you. It is the vilest book that exists in print—or very nearly so. If you keep a “reader,” it is charity to believe he never really read that book, but framed his verdict upon hearsay.
Bierce has written some admirable things—fugitive pieces—but none of them are among the “Nuggets.” There is humor in Dod Grile, but for every laugh that is in his book there are five blushes, ten shudders & a vomit. The laugh is too expensive.1explanatory note
In 1873 Andrew Chatto and W. E. Windus formed a partnership to succeed the late London publisher John Camden Hotten, who that spring had published Ambrose Bierce’s first collection, The Fiend’s Delight. By Dod Grile. In November 1873 they published Nuggets and Dust Panned Out in California by Dod Grile. Collected and Loosely Arranged By J. Milton Sloluck. Bierce (1842–?1914), whom Clemens had known in San Francisco in the mid 1860s, was in London on the staff of Fun and had seen Clemens there in 1872 and doubtless in 1873 as well. Given that in April 1874 Chatto and Windus were just publishing Clemens’s revised version of The Choice Humorous Works of Mark Twain (SLC 1874), an arrangement Bierce may have helped facilitate, they must have hoped Clemens would provide a quotable, if belated, “puff” for Nuggets and Dust. For a more favorable comment on Bierce’s work, see 1 Feb 75 to Stoddardclick to open link ( ET&S1 , 602–3; BAL , 1:1096, 1099; AD, 13 June 1906, CU-MARK, in MTE, 262; L5 , 156 n. 5, 157 n. 9).
MS, Boston Public Library and Eastern Massachusetts Regional Public Library System, Boston (MB).
L6 , 101–102; Goodspeed’s Book Shop 1950, lot 26, extracts.
donated anonymously in January 1956 to the Virginia and Richard Ehrlich Autograph Collection, Boston Public Library.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.