It was in 1867 that Webb published Mark Twain’s first book, the ‘Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras’; and it was in 1867 that the proprietors of the ‘Alta California’ supplied him with the funds necessary to enable him to become one of the passengers on the steamer Quaker City, which had been chartered to take a select party on what is now known as the Mediterranean trip.  The weekly letters, in which he set forth what befell him on this journey, were printed in the ‘Alta’ Sunday after Sunday, and were copied freely by the other Californian papers.  These letters served as the foundation of a book published in 1869 and called the ‘Innocents Abroad,’ a book which instantly brought to the author celebrity and cash.

Both of these valuable aids to ambition were increased by his next step, his appearance on the lecture platform.  Noah Brooks, who was present at his first attempt, has recorded that Mark Twain’s “method as a lecturer was distinctly unique and novel.  His slow, deliberate drawl, the anxious and perturbed expression of his visage, the apparently painful effort with which he framed his sentences, the surprize that spread over his face when the audience roared with delight or rapturously applauded the finer passages of his word-painting, were unlike anything of the kind they had ever known.”  In the many years since that first appearance the method has not changed, altho it has probably matured.  Mark Twain is one of the most effective of platform-speakers and one of the most artistic, with an art of his own which is very individual and very elaborate in spite of its seeming simplicity.

Altho he succeeded abundantly as a lecturer, and altho he was the author of the most widely-circulated book of the decade, Mark Twain still thought of himself only as a journalist; and when he gave up the West for the East, he became an editor of the ‘Buffalo Express,’ in which he had bought an interest.  In 1870 he married; and it is perhaps not indiscreet to remark that his was another of those happy unions of which there have been so many in the annals of American authorship.  In 1871 he removed to Hartford, which was to be his home for thirty years; and at the same time he gave up newspaper work.

In 1872 he wrote ‘Roughing It,’ and in the following year came his first sustained attempt at fiction, the ‘Gilded Age,’ written in collaboration with Charles Dudley Warner.  The character of Colonel Mulberry Sellers Mark Twain soon took out of this book to make it the central figure of a play, which the late John T. Raymond acted hundreds of times thruout the United States, the playgoing public pardoning the inexpertness of the dramatist in favor of the delicious humor and the compelling veracity with which the chief character was presented.  So universal was this type and so broadly recognizable its traits that there were many towns in which someone accosted the actor who impersonated the ever-hopeful schemer with the declaration:  “I’m the original of Sellers!  Didn’t Mark ever tell you?  Well, he took the Colonel from me!”