Submitted by scott on

February 28 Saturday – In Hartford Sam wrote to William Dean Howells asking a favor. Sam was interested in using a phonograph to dictate his new book, The American Claimant.

Won’t you drop in at the Boylston Building (New England Phonograph Co) & talk into the phonograph in an ordinary conversation-voice & see if another person (who didn’t hear you do it) can take the words from the thing without difficulty & repeat them to you…. My right arm is nearly disabled by rheumatism, but I am bound to write this book (& sell 100,000 copies of it — no, I mean a million — next fall.) I feel sure I can dictate the book into a phonograph if I don’t have to yell. I write 2,000 words a day; I think I can dictate twice as many.

But mind, if this is going to be too much trouble to you, — go ahead & do it, all the same. Ys ever [MTHL 2: 637-8]. Livy added a PS “protest” to say “it is a shameful to use a friend so.” Note: Howells answer came Mar. 3.

Frederick J. Hall wrote about getting out the Sherman book. Hall was glad Sam was writing a new book and had a plan he wanted to discuss for its sale that “we think will have the seventy-five thousand orders by the time we issue it….” [MTP].

Dunham Wheeler for Players Club (Dora Wheeler’s son) sent a handwritten note inviting Sam to lunch on Mar. 7. Sam wrote on the envelope, “Brer, ask him to give my love to the boys — am not able to be there” [MTP].

Morris White, a student at the Lexington, Miss. Normal School wrote to Sam asking for help with a speech he had to make on the life of Mark Twain [MTP].

The Hartford Courant ran a short humorous squib about Mark Twain on p.2 under “Bric-A-Brac”:

We read that at the Murray Hill Hotel the other day a porter vented his opinion in this wise concerning a gentleman not unknown in Hartford: “There goes the solemnest and dismalist gent as ever stopped at this ‘ouse. I don’t b’lieve he ever knowed what it was to larf.” The reference was to Samuel L. Clemens.

Links to Twain's Geography Entries

Day By Day Acknowledgment

Mark Twain Day By Day was originally a print reference, meticulously created by David Fears, who has generously made this work available, via the Center for Mark Twain Studies, as a digital edition.   

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