FOREWORD

Nowhere is the human being more truly revealed than in his letters.  Not in literary letters—­prepared with care, and the thought of possible publication—­but in those letters wrought out of the press of circumstances, and with no idea of print in mind.  A collection of such documents, written by one whose life has become of interest to mankind at large, has a value quite aside from literature, in that it reflects in some degree at least the soul of the writer.

The letters of Mark Twain are peculiarly of the revealing sort.  He was a man of few restraints and of no affectations.  In his correspondence, as in his talk, he spoke what was in his mind, untrammeled by literary conventions.

Necessarily such a collection does not constitute a detailed life story, but is supplementary to it.  An extended biography of Mark Twain has already been published.  His letters are here gathered for those who wish to pursue the subject somewhat more exhaustively from the strictly personal side.  Selections from this correspondence were used in the biography mentioned.  Most of these are here reprinted in the belief that an owner of the “Letters” will wish the collection to be reasonably complete.

[Etext Editor’s Note:  A. B. Paine considers this compendium a supplement to his “Mark Twain, A Biography”, I have arranged the volumes of the “Letters” to correspond as closely as possible with the dates of the Project Gutenberg six volumes of the “Biography”.  D.W.]

MARK TWAIN’S LETTERS

MARK TWAIN—­A BIOGRAPHICAL SUMMARY

Samuel Langhorne Clemens, for nearly half a century known and celebrated as “Mark Twain,” was born in Florida, Missouri, on November 30, 1835.  He was one of the foremost American philosophers of his day; he was the world’s most famous humorist of any day.  During the later years of his life he ranked not only as America’s chief man of letters, but likewise as her best known and best loved citizen.

The beginnings of that life were sufficiently unpromising.  The family was a good one, of old Virginia and Kentucky stock, but its circumstances were reduced, its environment meager and disheartening.  The father, John Marshall Clemens—­a lawyer by profession, a merchant by vocation—­had brought his household to Florida from Jamestown, Tennessee, somewhat after the manner of judge Hawkins as pictured in The Gilded Age.  Florida was a small town then, a mere village of twenty-one houses located on Salt River, but judge Clemens, as he was usually called, optimistic and speculative in his temperament, believed in its future.  Salt River would be made navigable; Florida would become a metropolis.  He established a small business there, and located his family in the humble frame cottage where, five months later, was born a baby boy to whom they gave the name of Samuel—­a family name—­and added Langhorne, after an old Virginia friend of his father.