More than one hundred years after his death, Mark Twain ranks as one of the most thoroughly documented and studied writers of his time. In addition to countless reprints of his books, the past century has seen publication of scores of editions of his previously unpublished works, plus collections of his journalism, speeches, letters, notebooks, autobiographical dictations, and interviews. Books about Mark Twain now number in the hundreds, articles in the thousands, with no letup in sight. Can anything truly fresh still be added to our understanding of him? One answer may be found in this volume.

Dear Mark Twain presents a selection of previously unpublished letters Samuel L. Clemens received from readers between 1863, the year he adopted the pen name "Mark Twain," and 1910, the year he died. Most are from ordinary people he never met. Though long known to scholars, these letters constitute an important documentary resource that has been little tapped. More than any other type of documents, they reveal what average readers thought of Clemens, "Mark Twain," and his works. Writing with no thought that their letters would ever be seen by other eyes, many readers expressed an incredible warmth of feeling and closeness to Clemens, often bursting with eagerness to declare how he touched their lives. Although many letters exhibit considerable passion, the warmth they exude is not always positive. Numerous letters are highly negative. Others are self-serving bids for personal help, attention, or publicity.

This volume is not a collection of "fan mail," but rather a broadly representative cross section of the wide range of opinions, feelings, and subjects expressed in all the letters Clemens received from readers. Each letter offers a fascinating glimpse into what people outside the worlds of professional criticism and scholarly study thought of Clemens during his lifetime. Many are deeply moving, more than a few are hilarious, some may be shocking, few are dull.

THE COLLECTION

Dear Mark Twain may lay claim to two notable firsts. It is the first published collection of letters to Clemens from readers. As early as a century ago, Albert Bigelow Paine, Clemens's literary executor and the first editor of the Mark Twain Papers, inserted extracts from reader letters in his monumental study, Mark Twain: A Biography—The Personal and Literary Life of Samuel Langhorne Clemens (New York, 1912). Since Paine's death in 1935, Clemens's correspondence files have been open to other researchers, many of whom have discussed and quoted reader letters in their own books. Until now, however, no one troubled to gather a selection of these letters into a book. This long delay may have had something to do with the fact that no collection of similar letters to any nineteenth-century author had ever been published. Had other such collections already existed, a book like Dear Mark Twain probably would have appeared well before now. The present volume therefore is also very likely the first published collection of authentic reader letters to any nineteenth-century author and, at the least, one of the few such collections for an author of any era.

The absence of similar collections of letters to other authors in itself says much about Clemens, who was not the only writer known to receive large volumes of mail from readers. Some writers, in fact, may have received even more mail than he did. The English novelist Charles Dickens is one possible example. Although he received an immense volume of mail from readers; however, virtually none of it has survived. Alarmed by the prospect that his intimate correspondence might one day be published, Dickens put his accumulated letters and papers to the torch in 1860. He continued to burn his mail throughout the rest of his life. More than fourteen thousand of his own letters have survived, but almost none written to him escaped the flames.

The French novelist Jules Verne, a closer contemporary of Clemens, provides another interesting case. In 1890, a magazine reported that Verne had "filed away over two thousand letters" from his American readers alone. Claims that Verne received more fan mail than any other author cannot be confirmed, however, because virtually all his reader letters have apparently disappeared.

Clemens differed from most authors in his attitude toward saving manuscripts and correspondence. He seemingly tried to keep almost everything. Equally remarkable is the fact that so much of his manuscript material survived the dislocations not only of his shifting residences and extensive travels but also vicissitudes in their later stewardship. Some correspondence has certainly been lost, but thanks to Clemens's pack-rat habits and the meticulous preservation of documents by the Mark Twain Papers of the University of California's Bancroft Library, a substantial trove of letters from readers has survived to make possible the present book. One wonders why Clemens saved these letters. Did he simply hate to discard manuscript material? Was he conscious of its possible value to his future literary reputation? Or did he think he might later find uses for some of the letters?

CONTENT OF THE LETTERS

Considered purely on their intrinsic interest, these letters make for fascinating and often entertaining reading. Many strain to be humorous, but the funniest are often those that are unintentionally amusing, such as a Dane's autograph request written in English so badly fractured that Clemens specially marked it for preservation. Especially common are letters with presumably serious but outlandish requests and propositions. What makes them comical is their authors' presumption in thinking that Clemens would respond with anything other than angry expletives. A curious example is a struggling writer who wanted to test the literary judgment of editors by having Clemens write for him an article he would try to sell under his own name to see if it would fetch ten dollars. If his experiment worked, he promised to send Clemens the ten dollars.

Some letters are amusing because their authors' attempts to be funny actually succeed. Such letters are rare, but when Clemens received one—such as a Protestant minister's complaint about his hands getting stuck to a self-pasting scrapbook—he was not above recording his appreciation. However, most readers' attempts at humor fail dismally. A common thread running through many is lame attempts to amuse or provoke Clemens by throwing his own words back at him—typically in the form of puns. The frequency of letters playing on "Innocents Abroad" and "Roughing It" alone must have become irksome, and more than a few letters offered weak puns such as "Clemens-y."

The letters can also be read as mirrors reflecting the images Clemens cast on the world. Clemens worked hard at crafting his own public image and must have...