October 18 Saturday – Still in St. Louis, Sam wrote the first Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass letter, burlesquing Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar [Gribben 626]. Sam used dialect, and grammatical and spelling errors to characterize a country bumpkin getting the worst of it in the big city. It was a literary strategy that would come to fruition in many of his future works. Snodgrass was also the last pen name Sam used prior to Mark Twain, in Nevada, Feb. 1863. Sam earned five dollars each for these letters, his first payments for freelance writing [MT Encyclopedia, Abshire 694]. “It is likely that he departed on Oct. 18 and arrived in Keokuk the following day” [MTL 1: 69-70].
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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.