1 September 1869 • Buffalo, N.Y. (MS: CLjC, UCCL 11538)
evening express $8 per annum. no. 14 east swan street.
weekly express $1.50 per annum.
We accept, & exchange with pleasure. If I had received your letter a week sooner, I would have remained in the lecture field & helped you talk. I was to have opened in Boston Nov. 10, but did not intend to go out of New England. But the other day I wrote Redpath, drawing out altogether. If he says it is all right, I am out of the field entirely for this season—& I hope this will be the case, for I had rather stay in one place a while, now, just for the novelty of it.1explanatory note
Across these sweltering intervening States I stretch my longing & lengthening hand for a friendly shake, & with it goeth my blessing.
Since 1858, under the pseudonym “Fat Contributor,” Alphonso Miner Griswold (1834–91) had been publishing humorous sketches while serving on the editorial staffs of the Buffalo Republic and Times, the Detroit Advertiser, the Cleveland Plain-Dealer, and the Cincinnati Times, of which he was now city editor. (Clemens here agrees to add the Times, to the Express’s exchanges.) Well known as a lecturer in the Midwest, Griswold was engaged to make his New England debut, in James Redpath’s Boston Lyceum Course, on 24 November 1869 (“‘The Fat Contributor,’” Boston Advertiser, 23 Nov 69, 1). His lecture that evening in Boston’s Music Hall, on “Indian Antiquities—humorously considered,” suffered by comparison with the performance Clemens himself gave there on 10 November. The Boston Advertiser called Griswold “a rather colorless copy of Mark Twain, or rather like a little of Mark Twain and a little water mixed together” (“Mr. A. Miner Griswold on ‘Injun Meal,’” 25 Nov 69, 1).
MS, James S. Copley Library, La Jolla, Calif. (CLjC).
L3 , 324; Maggs, lot 34, excerpt.
Sold by Maggs Brothers Limited in 1988 to John L. Feldman, who in turn sold it in 1990 to CLjC.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.