Suzy, in her biography, which she continued through this period, writes: 

Mama and I have both been very much troubled of late because papa, since he had been publishing General Grant’s books, has seemed to forget his own books and works entirely; and the other evening, as papa and I were promonading up and down the library, he told me that he didn’t expect to write but one more book, and then he was ready to give up work altogether, die, or, do anything; he said that he had written more than he had ever expected to, and the only book that he had been pertickularly anxious to write was one locked up in the safe downstairs, not yet published.

The book locked in the safe was Captain Stormfield, and the one he expected to write was A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.  He had already worked at it in a desultory way during the early months of 1886, and once wrote of it to Webster: 

I have begun a book whose scene is laid far back in the twilight of tradition; I have saturated myself with the atmosphere of the day and the subject and got myself into the swing of the work.  If I peg away for some weeks without a break I am safe.

But he could not peg away.  He had too many irons in the fire for that.  Matthew Arnold had criticized General Grant’s English, and Clemens immediately put down other things to rush to his hero’s defense.  He pointed out that in Arnold’s criticism there were no less than “two grammatical crimes and more than several examples of very crude and slovenly English,” and said: 

There is that about the sun which makes us forget his spots, and when we think of General Grant our pulses quicken and his grammar vanishes; we only remember that this is the simple soldier, who, all untaught of the silken phrase-makers, linked words together with an art surpassing the art of the schools, and put into them a something which will still bring to American ears, as long as America shall last, the roll of his vanished drums and the tread of his marching hosts.—­[Address to Army and Navy Club.  For full text see Appendix]

Clemens worked at the Yankee now and then, and Howells, when some of the chapters were read to him, gave it warm approval and urged its continuance.

Howells was often in Hartford at this time.  Webster & Co. were planning to publish The Library of Humor, which Howells and “Charley” Clark had edited several years before, and occasional conferences were desirable.  Howells tells us that, after he and Clark had been at great trouble to get the matter logically and chronologically arranged, Clemens pulled it all to pieces and threw it together helter-skelter, declaring that there ought to be no sequence in a book of that sort, any more than in the average reader’s mind; and Howells admits that this was probably the truer method in a book made for the diversion rather than the instruction of the reader.