It is torture to write a letter. And it is still greater torture to receive one—except yours & Ma’s”—so young Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835-1910) wrote to his sister Pamela in 1864. Whatever the torture, Clemens was a prolific correspondent, and in Mark Twain’s Letters—Volume I: 1853-1866, we have the commencement of a publishing venture that will present us with more than ten thousand letters, of which two thirds have never been printed before. It is a pleasure to report that, even as a youth, Twain was a humorist for all seasons.
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In the present volume, covering Twain’s life between the ages of seventeen and thirty-one, the young printer’s devil and journeyman typesetter has left Hannibal, Missouri—his wanderlust spurred by an inconsequential quarrel with his brother Orion, whose Hannibal Journal taught the boy the trade. Seeking the greener pastures of St. Louis, New York, Philadelphia, Washington, and Keokuk and Muscatine, Iowa, young Twain supported himself by setting type in the printshops of the towns he visited between 1853-57. He wrote home travel letters to his mother, some of which were reprinted in Orion’s paper under the pseudonym Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass. (Clemens used several pseudonyms before settling on Mark Twain, one of my favorites being W. Epamonidas Adrastus Blab.)
It is a pleasure to report that, even as a youth, Twain was a humorist for all seasons.
Wanting an even larger horizon, Twain set out for
