November – In New York City, Sam inscribed a copy of Mark Twain’s (Burlesque) Autobiography and First Romance to: Ernest D. North: “E.D. North, Esq. Mark Twain November, 1900” [MTP: Parke-Bernet Galleries catalog, Oct. 27, 1953, No. 1458, Item 173].
The November issue of Practitioner, a medical journal, published on p. 489 an exam of Mark Twain’s view of Mary Baker Eddy’s religion, Christian Science. Twain predicted that “In 1910 there will be 10,000,000 Christian Scientists in America and in 1930, the governing power in the republic…” [eBay July 22, 2009, item 270430540208]. (Not in Tenney); thanks to Jo Dee Benussi.
About this month Sam wrote a short note to William Webster Ellsworth: “Dear Ellsworth: If you need
another guest don’t overlook Wister. S.L.C.” [MTP: Ellworth, A Golden Age of Authors, 1919 p.244]. Note: if this note was written in Nov. it likely follows shortly after Sam’s Nov. 2 to Ellsworth and relates to his confirmation for Dec. 4 at the Aldine.
Sometime about this month Owen Wister wrote to Sam. Quoting from William Webster Ellsworth’s above note [MTP].
Critic (NY) ran an anonymous article, “The Lounger,” p.398. Tenney: “Includes brief comment on MT’s return from London, where he told a reporter he had ‘done more regular, systematic work here than in any other city’” [31]. The magazine also ran a brief notice for The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg on p.468 [32]. William Archer’s article on the story ran on p.413-15: Tenney: “ ‘A parable pure and simple…were we to take it as a story, as a representation of life, its cynicism would be intolerable.’ MT has given us moral lessons ‘translated into modern terms of almost Swiftian sternness.’ (More of a discussion of this one tale than a review of the book)” [32].
Blackwood’s ran an anonymous review of The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg, p. 733-4. Tenney: “Nothing on the title story, and the other stories and sketches in the volume are dismissed as ‘nothing very great,’ but TS, HF, LOM [LM] ‘form as conspicuous and valuable a contribution to the literature of the United States as has been made since the days of Poe’ and ‘Mark Twain at his best is good, in his own line, as any living writer of English prose.’ At times he is ‘too fond of being didactic, of pointing morals, of teaching the old world how to conduct its affairs,’ and he ‘is conspicuously defective in the historical sense’” [32].
Critic (NY) ran an article by W.J.H., p. 398-400 using quotations from a letter. Tenney: “W.J.H. on possible bombshells in MT autobiography to be published a hundred years after his death—but ‘how slender is the possibility’ that his reputation will endure” [33].
Gribben (p. 675) reports on Success Magazine: “Theodore Dreiser, sometimes an unreliable source, reports that
in November 1900 Clemens said to him: ‘You say you’re from Success Magazine? Don’t think I ever heard of it. But the name is sort of comforting’ (Dreiser, ‘Three Contacts’ [1935], p. 162A).”