March 23 Monday – Sam wrote from Hartford to Jerome B. Stillson (1841-1880), managing editor of the New York World and a native of Buffalo. Sam had written “ a rather lengthy review of that unfortunate & sadly ridiculous book of Miss Cecilia Cleveland’s about Chappaqua.” (The Story of a Summer; Or, Journal Leaves from Chappaqua.) Sam wanted his negative review published anonymously, probably because the publisher for Cecilia Cleveland’s book was the same George W. Carleton who had so brusquely rejected The Jumping Frog book. Stillson did not print Sam’s review, but the Boston Evening Transcript as well as Warner in the Hartford Courant, expressed a similar view. Sam expressed in his review that whoever persuaded Cleveland to publish was to blame more than the authoress [MTL 6: 87]. Note: Whenever Sam was slighted, his memory was long and his blood rarely cooled.

Sam wrote a book dealer for a list of books, asking if there was a discount for authors, he was “willing to take advantage of it”; if not, he didn’t want to “create a damaging precedent” [MTL 6: 88].

The Hartford Times said Sam’s house going up on Farmington Avenue was “one of the oddest looking buildings in the State ever designed for a dwelling, if not the whole country” [Andrews 81].