October 28 Saturday – Sam wrote from Hartford to Ellen D. Conway, Moncure’s wife, apologizing for thinking he had answered her letter of two months before, but discovering that he had not. Ellen’s letter concerned the electrotypes, cost and disposition of which Sam had offered to absorb.
October 27 Friday – Sam dictated a letter from Hartford to John T. Raymond, who was in Toronto, Canada and who evidently had made objections to terms in their agreement to continue in his role of Col. Sellers in the play Gilded Age, which was eventually called Colonel Sellers. Sam wrote that he had supposed they might meet but he was going to Europe “for a year or two” with his family in April.
October 26 Thursday – Sam wrote to William Cullen Bryant. This is another letter soliciting feedback on one George Vaughan, a Virginia writer who authored Progressive Religious and Social Poems (see Oct. 25, 1875 to the editor of the Hartford Courant). Vaughan professed to be engaged in establishing a normal school for colored people in Virginia and that many prominent people, Bryant among them, had contributed to his fund.
October 25 Wednesday – Sam answered a letter from an unidentified woman (perhaps Miss Wood) who had been in Memphis to help the injured and dying from the Pennsylvania boiler explosion that killed Sam’s brother Henry. Sam could not recall the person and answered that he didn’t like to think about that week in Memphis for the horror of it.
October 23 Monday – Sam had received the printed page back from Howells, naming the Ah Sin drama, himself and Bret Harte and the year—for copyright. He wrote to A. Spofford, Librarian of Congress for copyright application. The letter was stamped COPYRIGHT OCT 25 1876 [MTLE 1: 133].
October 22 Sunday – The NY Sun, p. 4, ran what Budd calls “A comic, spurious interview” with Sam titled, “Mark Twain / An Extract from a Private Letter to a Gentleman of This City” [Interviews 1].
October 20 Friday – Sam sent his attorney, Charles E. Perkins, a postcard advising him of the receipt of “the Philadelphia checks for $1000 & $514” [MTLE 1: 132].
October 19 Thursday – Sam wrote from Hartford to his cousin Mary Ann Pamelia Xantippe “Tip” Saunders (1838-1922), who was born in Kentucky and studied art in New York. She was the first listing for “artist” in the 1874 Louisville phone book, and later ran an art school there. Tip had written asking to visit. Tip was the daughter of Ann Hancock Saunders, half-sister of John Marshall Clemens.
October 18 Wednesday – In Cambridge, Mass., Howells wrote to Sam about “putting the Atlantic people up to a little enterprise,” –the publication of “one-number stories from the Atlantic” [MTHL 1: 161].
October 17 Tuesday ca. – Xantippe (“Tip”) Saunders wrote to Sam (not extant) but referred to by Sam in his Oct. 19 reply [Oct. 19 to Saunders].