Uniform Edition de luxe – $ 10,000 Tumbles In – “Splendid Bird, Set Her Again” Politics of Peace – Hadleyburg – Making Fun of Mrs. Eddy Budapest Reading – Karl Kraus & Critics – Twain in Top Ten– Authorized Bio Sketch – “Concerning the Jews”– Vienna Farewell – Kellgren’s “System” Becomes Osteopathy Club Dinners Galore – Sanna for the Damned – Boer War Not Boring – London Hermits
November – “From the ‘London Times’ of 1904” first ran in the November issue of Century. It was collected in How to Tell a Story, and Other Essays (1900) and The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg and Other Stories and Essays (1900) [Budd Collected 2: 1004].
October – Ladies’ Home Journal ran “The Anecdotal Side of Mark Twain, p. 5-6.
September – Pall Mall Magazine issue for Sept. ran “The Real Mark Twain,” p. 28-36 by Carlyle G. Smythe, Sam’s “down under” tour manager and companion in London prior to Susy’s death [Gribben 464]. Review of Reviews (London) for this month summarized Smythe’s article and quotes passages on “His Literary Tastes” [Tenney 27].
August – From this month through October, Sam wrote “The Great Dark,” unfinished and unpublished during his lifetime. It first ran in Letters from the Earth, 1962, Bernard DeVoto, ed. [Budd Collected 2: 1004].
Sam inscribed a copy of Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Lowden Sabbath Morn (1898) “To Livy / on her next birthday. / SL Clemens / Kaltenleutgeben, August, ‘98” [Gribben 663]. Note: Sam had requested the “new Stevenson book” from Chatto on July 26.
July – Noah Brooks’ article, “Early Days of the Overland,” ran in the Overland Monthly p. 3-11. Tenney: “Contains passing reference to MT, pp. 7-9, as one of the contributors to the Overland Monthly” [29]. Note: an excerpt from this article ran in the Apr. 1899 issue of the same publication [30].
June – Sam sent a part-printed subscription form to the Vienna Neue Freie Presse (“ New Free Press”) seeking a run of July 1 to Oct. 31, and asking to “Please send the bill by the postman.” Under the line for “character” (title), Sam wrote “Hasn’t any” [MTP: Bomsey Autographs catalogs, No. 46, Item 103].
A. Hoffman puts this month as the one Clara Clemens decided to give up the piano as a career and to choose what her late sister excelled in, singing. Though he errs on this date, he observes:
May – Sam’s option on the sale of Jan Szczepanik’s Raster machine in America was allowed to expire. Rogers had not been enthusiastic and now America was at war with Spain. Letters from Sam to Rogers for the period reveal Sam’s “increasingly crestfallen responses” to Rogers’ letters on the subject, none of which are extant [Dolmetsch 204]. Note: See photos of both of Szczepanik’s machines p. 202-3. Sam remained friends with the young inventor and also admired his capitalist backer, Ludwig Kleinberg.
April – Overland Monthly p.378-80 ran an anonymous review, Following the Equator in Zigzag: Tenney: “A review, using abundant quotation to illustrate an estimate of Following the Equator as ‘a happy and interesting jumble…a traveler’s miscellany’” [27]. Note: this and many other reviews will be found in Budd’s 1999 Mark Twain: The Contemporary Reviews.
March – Harper’s Monthly published Mark Twain’s “Stirring Times in Austria” in their Mar. 1898 issue. Dolmetsch writes of the reaction in Vienna to the article, which: