TWAIN MARK Autograph Letter Signed Samuel Clemens

Sale 2043 - Lot 355

Price Realized: $ 6,670

?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price

Estimate: $ 2,000 - $ 3,000

JOKING ABOUT HIS OWN DEATH TWAIN, MARK. Autograph Letter Signed, "Samuel Clemens," to his good friend Will Bowen (the basis for the character Joe Harper in Tom Sawyer), on visiting Australia, relating a long story about how someone once wrote his wife telling her that he had died in Australia during a speaking tour (a story later printed in his Following the Equator), joking about himself and writing that he cannot go to Australia because of his children's education. 21/2 pages, 3 single 8vo sheets; inked received stamp on the first page. Hartford, 3 December 1889

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"Yes sir! I should like to go again. For I had a noble good time in Australia once -- by proxy. I have hunted all about for the letter which told me about it, but it is unfindable. However, in brief, these are the facts. Years ago when I was younger & not afraid of travel, I used to get ready about once per annum to go out & lecture in Australia & of course I always told a lot of friends & strangers about my project -- which was a natural thing to do. Now as to that letter. It came to my wife eight or ten years ago from an English friend of ours who was yachting in those distant waters. It broke to Mrs. Clemens as gently as possible the news of my death in Melbourne or somewhere out there . . . The writer of the letter had arrived just in time to march with the funeral & so was able to say to my widow, the present & only Mrs Clemens, that an old friend saw me interred & that of the tears that were shed for me, not all were the tears of strangers. There -- think of that. I seem to see that dead fraud enjoying those tears yet & trying to smile his satisfaction in this final & unlooked for cap-stone to his gaudy Australian career of social success & financial crime. Very likely he was a pretty poor sort of humorist when alive but certainly he played his hand first-rate as a corpse . . ."