Litigating P&P Drama – Slowly Strangled by Paige – Readings for Charity - Copyright Cause – Howells’ Tragedy – Chang Riley & Eng Nye – Theo Crane Dies Baseball - Dinner – “Not a man, but a hog” – “No stoppage upon any pretext” - Pinkeyed Censor – Stedman & Beard – Elsie Leslie – Connecticut Yankee Published

More Publishing Struggles – Library of Humor – Blizzar - “Don’t Wear your Arctics in the White House”– Congressional Hear - Theo’s Stroke – Grace King – Webster Bought out for $

1888 – Sometime during this year an old fellow-printer from the spring of 1853 in St. Louis, Anthony Kennedy, wrote to Sam with some sort of invitation that Sam felt would “get me in trouble with No. 6” — a reference to a Webster & Co. Contract. Sam declined, and told Kennedy:

Browning Reader – Too Many Books to Publish – Webster’s Neuralgia is a Pain - English as She is Taught – Soul & Entrails – Beecher Advance, Beecher Dead - Embezzler Nabbed – Question the Queen – Another Troublesome Dinner

1887 – Sometime early in the year, Sam agreed to take charge of a Wednesday Browning
reading circle, made up mostly of ladies. They would meet every week in Sam’s billiard room.
(See Mar. 22 to Fairbanks.) Paine writes:

June – Sam wrote “The Lost Ear-ring,” which was not published in his lifetime [Fables of Man 145- 148]. Note: source notes: “The tale begins with the date 6 June 1878, and the verso of manuscript page 13 bears the heading ‘Schloss Hotel Heidelberg, June 5’…The title was supplied at the time Bernard DeVoto was the Editor of the Mark Twain Papers.”

May – Sam’s short story, “About Magnanimous-Incident Literature” ran in the Atlantic Monthly [Wells, 22]. During this month, Sam pinned a clipping from a James Payn essay, “An Adventure in a Forest; or, Dickens’s Maypole Inn,” to his Notebook 14. “Payn describes his futile search for Epping Forest and the famous Maypole Inn of Barnaby Rudge” [Gribben 536]

An entry following one dated May 25 in Sam’s notebook decries the censorship of his age:

March – Sam’s short story, “The Loves of Alonzo Fitz Clarence and Rosannah Ethelton,” ran in the Atlantic Monthly [Wells, 22]. It also ran on the front page of the Hartford Courant on Feb. 16 [Courant.com]

February – In Hartford Sam wrote to an unidentified “friend in Detroit denying the charge that he is lazy. Instead of being lazy, he says, he has no less than four books under way, with the title of each nicely written out in a plain hand and the first chapters headed off” [MTPO: “Recent Changes,” Jan. 20, 2009: Washington Post, Feb. 26, 1878].
Sam signed an identification card that was either some sort of template, or for some sort of whimsy [Live auctioneers, Sept. 28, 2004, lot 0162]. See insert.

January – The last of a four-part, 15,000 word article on Sam and Joe Twichell’s trip to Bermuda, ran in the Atlantic Monthly: “Some Rambling Notes of an Idle Excursion” [Wells 22].

Late Spring, Early Summer – Sometime between Apr. 11 and July 3, Sam picnicked with Robert Bunker Swain and Clara Swain, and George E. Barnes, editor and co-owner of the Morning Call. Swain was superintendent of the U.S. Mint in San Francisco, [MTL 3: 354n3].

November 20 Wednesday – Sam wrote two letters to his mother, Jane Clemens and family upon arriving in New York, and finished them this day.

—the Herald folks got me at 6 o’clock, & notwithstanding I had an engagement to dine at the St. Nicholas with some ladies [Mary Fairbanks and Charles Langdon have been identified]. & take them to the theatre, I sat down in one of the editorial rooms & wrote a long article that will make the Quakers get up & howl in the morning.