“The Clemens house was the only one I have ever known where there was never any preoccupation in the evenings, and where visitors were always welcome.  Clemens was the best kind of a host; his evenings after dinner were an unending flow of stories.”

Friends living near by usually came and went at will, often without the ceremony of knocking or formal leave-taking.  They were more like one great family in that neighborhood, with a community of interests, a unity of ideals.  The Warner families and the Clemenses were particularly intimate, and out of their association grew Mark Twain’s next important literary undertaking, his collaboration with Charles Dudley Warner in ‘The Gilded Age’.

A number of more or less absurd stories have been printed about the origin of this book.  It was a very simple matter, a perfectly natural development.

At the dinner-table one night, with the Warners present, criticisms of recent novels were offered, with the usual freedom and severity of dinner-table talk.  The husbands were inclined to treat rather lightly the novels in which their wives were finding entertainment.  The wives naturally retorted that the proper thing for the husbands to do was to furnish the American people with better ones.  This was regarded in the nature of a challenge, and as such was accepted—­mutually accepted:  that is to say, in partnership.  On the spur of the moment Clemens and Warner agreed that they would do a novel together, that they would begin it immediately.  This is the whole story of the book’s origin; so far, at least, as the collaboration is concerned.  Clemens, in fact, had the beginning of a story in his mind, but had been unwilling to undertake an extended work of fiction alone.  He welcomed only too eagerly, therefore, the proposition of joint authorship.  His purpose was to write a tale around that lovable character of his youth, his mother’s cousin, James Lampton—­to let that gentle visionary stand as the central figure against a proper background.  The idea appealed to Warner, and there was no delay in the beginning.  Clemens immediately set to work and completed 399 pages of the manuscript, the first eleven chapters of the book, before the early flush of enthusiasm waned.

Warner came over then, and Clemens read it aloud to him.  Warner had some plans for the story, and took it up at this point, and continued it through the next twelve chapters; and so they worked alternately, “in the superstition,” as Mark Twain long afterward declared, “that we were writing one coherent yarn, when I suppose, as a matter of fact, we were writing two incoherent ones.”—­[The reader may be interested in the division of labor.  Clemens wrote chapters I to XI; also chapters XXIV, XXV, xxvii, XXVIII, xxx, XXXII, xxxiii, XXXIV, XXXVI, XXXVII, XLII, xliii, XLV, li, lii, LIII, lvii, lix, lx, LXI, LXII, and portions of chapters xxxv, xlix, LVI.  Warner wrote chapters XII to XXIII; also chapters xxvi, XXIX, XXXI, xxxviii, XXXIX, XL, xli, xliv, XLVI, xlvii, XLVIII, L, liv, lv, lviii, lxiii, and portions of chapters xxxv, xlix, and LVI.  The work was therefore very evenly divided.