Jun 25, 2024 - Sale 2674

Sale 2674 - Lot 168

Price Realized: $ 4,750
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,000 - $ 1,500
TWAIN USES A SLUR IN RESPONSE TO HIS BOOK'S FAVORABLE REVIEW TWAIN, MARK. Fragment of Autograph Letter Signed, "Twain," [to William Dean Howells,] including only the letter's 17-line postscript, expressing satisfaction after reading his review of Roughing It (1872) in the Atlantic Monthly magazine and hoping that the New-York Tribune does not publish a negative review. 1 page, 8vo, ruled paper; reinforced at all edges verso, faint scattered soiling, folds. [Elmra, 22 May 1872]
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"P.S. Since penning the foregoing, the Atlantic has come to hand with that most thoroughly & entirely satisfactory notice of Roughing It in it; & I am as uplifted & reassured by it as a mother who has given birth to a white baby when she was awfully afraid it was going to be a mulatto. I have been afraid & shaky all along; but now, unless the N.Y. Tribune gives the book a black eye, I am all right."
Published as a fragment (the text of the missing portion is unknown) in Mark Twain's Letters, Volume 5: 1872-1873 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2023), 95.
In his review, published in the "Recent Literature" column of the June issue of the Atlantic, Howells characterized Roughing It as "singularly entertaining, and its humor is always amiable, manly, generous." In his My Mark Twain: Reminiscences and Criticisms (1910), Howells erroneously recalled Twain's provocative remark about a baby's birth as having concerned the review of Twain's earlier travelogue, The Innocents Abroad (1869).