March 18 Saturday – With Livy’s improvement, Sam & wife traveled to Quarry Farm, the home of Theodore and Susan Crane, Livy’s adopted sister. Livy was carried out of 472 Delaware Street, Buffalo, on a mattress to the train station [Reigstad 188]. Throughout the spring and summer of 1871 Sam would walk the mile and a half from the Elmira house in town to the farmhouse on the hill overlooking the Chemung River [Powers, MT A Life 298]. Years later, it would become the site of some heavy-duty writing, principally on HF.

It seems many newspapers passed on reviewing A Burlesque Autobiography. Those that didn’t scalded Sam. From “New Publications,” p. 1, San Francisco Evening Bulletin:

As a literary production the performance is beneath criticism. The jokes are stale, the puns bad, the conceits forced, the “points” pointless. There is no underlying motive, no moral obvious or implied, nothing but harlequinism, pure and simple. And it is bad harlequinism at that. It does not even make us laugh. Mr. Clemens is a man of much literary ability, but he lacks the earnestness of the true humorist, and has been degenerating of late into the lowest type of literary buffoon [Budd, Reviews 93].