August 30 Tuesday – In Kaltenleutgeben, Austria Sam wrote to William Dean Howells.

“This morning I read to Mrs. Clemens your visit to the Spanish prisoners, & have just finished reading it to her again—& lord, how find it is & beautiful, & how gracious & moving. You have the gifts—of mind & heart” [MTHL 2: 679]. Note: Harper’s Weekly of Aug. 20 had published Howells’ “Our Spanish Prisoners at Portsmouth.”

Sam also wrote to J. Henry Harper about the new arrangement (Supplement) that their attorney, George Lockhart Rives, was working on; he had hoped that Harpers would handle all his books in the trade while Frank Bliss would deal only in Uniform Edition sets. If it wasn’t too late, could a date be set for release of the Uniform Edition? Sam then suggested an article “of a reminiscent sort.”

The first magazine article I ever published appeared in Harper’s Monthly 31 years ago under the name of (by typographical error) MacSwain. Can you send it to me? I think it appeared in the first half of 1867. It is the diary of a passenger who was shipwrecked in the “Hornet,” a clipper ship which was burned on the Line, & the survivors made their way (4,000 miles) to Honolulu, & were 43 days in an open boat [MTP].

Note: the article appeared to be unsigned; the table of contents for vol. 34 of Harper’s Monthly, (the Dec. 1866 issue) did not come out until May, 1867, and attributed writer as “Mark Swain.” Harper evidently sent Sam tear sheets to his story in the Dec. 1866 issue of Harper’s Monthly.His typist, Marion von Kendler , made a typescript of it (not extant) which Sam revised. It was published in the Nov. 1899 issue of the Century Magazine [AMT 1: 127]. Sam’s rework and narrative about the the essay, “My Debut as a Literary Person,” was used as the title piece in the 1903 My Debut as a Literary Person and Essays and Other Stories.