May 11 Wednesday – In Hartford Sam wrote to Charles Webster:

Joe Jefferson has written his Autobiography! You see, by George we’ve got to keep places open for great books; they spring up in the most unexpected places. [¶] I will read for “literary quality,” & then take it down to you on the 18th, to be read for pecuniary quality…[MTP].

Sam also wrote a rather revealing letter to Jeannette L. Gilder, founder of Critic, about his writing habits and books written:

It is my habit to keep four or five books in process of erection all the time, & every summer add a few courses of brick to two or three of them; but I cannot forecast which of the two or three it is going to be….Do you care for trifles of information? Well then, “Tom Sawyer” & “The Prince & the Pauper” were each on the stocks two or three years, & “Old Times on the Mississippi” eight. One of my unfinished books has been on the stocks sixteen years; another, seventeen. This latter book could have been finished in a day, at any time during the past five years. But as in the first of these two narratives, all the action takes place in Noah’s ark, & as in the other the action takes place in heaven, there seemed to be no hurry….I have written & completed only eleven books, whereas with half the labor that a journalist does I could have written sixty in that time [MTP].