6 January 1875 • Hartford, Conn. (MS: MH-H, UCCL 01174)
Many thanks for the present of the magazine which I am straining myself to adorn.1explanatory note I see I could have saved an annual subscription by contributing some years earlier, but the thing was kept secret from me.
P. S. I appreciate the voluntary compliment of being paid more than better men, but then I am trying to deserve it! This is rare among writers.2explanatory note
letter docketed: S. L. Clemens Ⓐemendation and in pencil: F. J. G. 3explanatory note
Clemens was expected to do more than “adorn” the Atlantic Monthly. In 1907, Howells recalled:
We counted largely on his popularity to increase our circulation when we began to print the piloting papers; but with one leading journal in New York republishing them as quickly as they appeared, and another in St. Louis supplying the demand of the Mississippi Valley, and another off in San Francisco offering them to his old public on the Pacific slope, the sales of the Atlantic Monthly were not advanced a single copy, so far as we could make out. Those were the simple days when the magazines did not guard their copyright as they do now; advance copies were sent to the great newspapers, which helped their readers to the plums, poetic and prosaic, before the magazine could reach the news-stands, and so relieved them of the necessity of buying it. (Howells 1907, 601)
The “Old Times on the Mississippi” sketches were widely reprinted—for example, “Western Life” (New York Times, 16 Dec 74, 2), “A Lightning Pilot” (St. Louis Times, 24 Jan 75, 3), “Old Times on the Mississippi” (Cleveland Herald, 30 Jan 75, 27 Feb 75, 2), and “Old Times on the Mississippi” (Hartford Courant, 26 Apr 75, 1). They were also excerpted—for example, “The January Magazines” (New York Evening Post, 19 Dec 74, Supplement, 2) and “Old Times on the Mississippi” (Boston Advertiser, 25 Mar 75, 2). No comprehensive record of such borrowings has been compiled.
In addition to informing him of his free contributor’s subscription, the letter from Houghton and Company (now lost) that Clemens answered probably specified the fee of $20 per printed page (averaging about $140 per article) he was to receive for “Old Times.” By comparison, he had received only $100 in January 1873 for his two Sandwich Islands letters to the New York Tribune, which together were the equivalent of about eight Atlantic pages. In 1910 Howells recalled,
The late H. O. Houghton . . . was always urging me to get him to write. I will take the credit of being eager for him, but it is to the publisher’s credit that he tried, so far as the modest traditions of The Atlantic would permit, to meet the expectations in pay which the colossal profits of Clemens’s books might naturally have bred in him. Whether he was really able to do this he never knew from Clemens himself, but probably twenty dollars a page did not surfeit the author of books that “sold right along just like the Bible.” (Howells 1968, 267–68, 343)
That Clemens was not entirely content with his Atlantic pay is indicated by his 1 February 1875 letter to Charles Warren Stoddard. His dissatisfaction may have been fed by an awareness that Bret Harte had received $10,000 to write a dozen stories in 1871–72 for the Atlantic and its sister journals. Nevertheless, by normal Atlantic standards Clemens was well paid: in the 1880s, under Aldrich’s editorship, Howells himself received only $15 a page, and most authors received $10 or less (see also 2 Sept 74 to Howells, n. 2click to open link; 29 Oct 74 to Howells, n. 1click to open link; L5 , 269; Sedgwick, 178).
Francis Jackson Garrison (1848–1916), son of William Lloyd Garrison, accepted a position at Houghton and Company’s Riverside Press in 1871 and soon became Houghton’s confidential financial assistant. The two men had primary responsibility for determining authors’ fees (Ballou, 136–38; Sedgwick, 177).
MS, Houghton Library, Harvard University (MH-H, shelf mark bMS Am 1925 [390]).
L6 , 339–340; Monteiro, 9.
deposited by Houghton, Mifflin Company sometime after 1943.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.