September 28 Tuesday – Samuel Sidney McClure (1857-1949) wrote from New York to Sam asking for “such facts as you would be willing to have published in the syndicate” relating to his early literary career. McClure was writing a paper showing how “a number of well known writers earned their first money by their pens.” Sam wrote on the envelope, “Puh!”[MTP].

Note: McClure was unemployed in 1884 when he started McClure’s Syndicate, which became in time America’s first profitable literary syndicate. He began by buying authors’ works for a price of around one hundred and fifty dollars and then selling rights to publish the works to newspapers across the country for five dollars apiece. His company lost money the first few years of operation, but eventually showed a modest profit. McClure’s Syndicate would change the America’s newspapers and fiction, by promoting such American writers as Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, Joel Chandler Harris, and Sarah Orne Jewett, which helped to lessen the old system of papers “stealing” from each other. Additionally McClure brought several English authors to American readers, including Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, and Arthur Conan Doyle. McClure would establish McClure’s Magazine in 1893.

‡ – See Addenda, letter to Mrs. Parker.