Mark Twain's Letters — Volume 4 (1886-1900)

The Twichell's have been here four days and we have had good times with them. Joe and I ran over to Homburg, the great pleasure resort, Saturday, to dine with some friends, and...

First, Howells and I had a chat together. I asked about Mrs. H. He said she was fine, still steadily improving, and nearly back to her old best health. I asked (as if I didn't k...

P. S. Mrs. Clemens has come in since, and read your letter and is deeply distressed. She thinks that in some letter of mine I must have reproached you. She says it is wonderful...

DEAR OLD JOE,--Harper for May was given to me yesterday in Johannesburg by an American lady who lives there, and I read your article on me while coming up in the train with her...

When Clemens had been platforming with Cable and returned to Hartford for his Christmas vacation, the Warner and Clemens families had joined in preparing for him a surprise perf...

The machine was finished several weeks ago, and has been running ever since in the machine shop. It is a magnificent creature of steel, all of Pratt & Whitney's super-best workm...

.... I confine myself to life with which I am familiar when pretending to portray life. But I confined myself to the boy-life out on the Mississippi because that had a peculiar...

“The companion to The Prince and the Pauper,” mentioned in this letter, was the story of Joan of Arc, perhaps the most finished of Mark Twain's literary productions. His interes...

DEAR JOE, There's that letter that I began so long ago--you see how it is: can't get time to finish anything. I pile up lots of work, nevertheless. There may be idle people in t...

I hope it will interest you (for I have no one else who would much care to know it) that here lately the dread of leaving the children in difficult circumstances has died down a...

MY DEAR MADAM,--I do not know how it is in the White House, but in this house of ours whenever the minor half of the administration tries to run itself without the help of the m...

We came down in an hour by rail, but I couldn't get your telegram till this morning, for it was Sunday and they had shut up the post office to go to the circus. I went, too. It...

This mood will pass, some day--there is history for it. But it cannot pass until my wife comes up out of the submergence. She was always so quick to recover herself before, but...

For several quite plain and simple reasons, an “interview” must, as a rule, be an absurdity, and chiefly for this reason--It is an attempt to use a boat on land or a wagon on wa...

DEAR MR. ROGERS,--Notwithstanding your heart is “old and hard,” you make a body choke up. I know you “mean every word you say” and I do take it “in the same spirit in which you...

DEAR HOWELLS,--..... I've a lot of things to write you, but it's no use--I can't get time for anything these days. I must break off and write a postscript to Canon Wilberforce b...

Lang closed his article by referring to the story of Huck as the “great American novel which had escaped the eyes of those who watched to see this new planet swim into their ken.”

Before the days of international copyright no American author's books were pirated more freely by Canadian publishers than those of Mark Twain. It was always a sore point with h...

I believe that in the next chapter my notion of the Boer was rightly conceived. He is popularly called uncivilized, I do not know why. Happiness, food, shelter, clothing, wholes...