November 30 Tuesday – Sam’s 62nd Birthday.

In Vienna, Austria Livy wrote for Sam to Chatto & Windus [MTP].

Orion and Mollie Clemens wrote to Sam, offering birthday salutations and congratulations on Sam now being able to pay his debts, and on his new book, FE. He related that the book agent in Keokuk, one Smythe had 84 subscribers for it to date. J. Kaplan writes that Orion “was busy with a new literary scheme, a biography of Judas of Galilee, which would penetrate the mystery of the Essene sect known as the Society of the Dead Sea” [350; MTP]. Paine gives us Orion’s suggestion that Sam use him as a caricature:

I would fit in as a fool character, believing, what the Tennessee mountaineers predicted, that I would grow up to be a great man and go to Congress. I did not think it worth the trouble to be a common great man like Andy Johnson. I wouldn’t give a pinch of snuff, little as I needed it, to be anybody less than Napoleon. So when a farmer took my father’s offer for some chickens under advisement till the next day I said to myself, “Would Napoleon Bonaparte have taken under advisement till the next day an offer to sell him some chickens?” [1053]. Note: Sam wrote on the envelope, “Written 11 days before his death—his last letter. Preserve it.” Orion would die on Dec. 11.