Beschreibung:

CLEMENS, SAMUEL LANGHORNE ("Mark Twain") Autograph letter signed ("Samuel L. Clemens") with postscript signed ("S.L.C.") and a one-page addition by Livy Clemens on final page, to Dr. John Brown friend and cinfidantof Queen Victoria, Quarry Farm, near Elmira [New York], 4 September 1876. 16 pages, 12mo, written on rectos only, the leaves stiched together at left-hand edge with thin thread to make a small pamphlet, first leaf with imprinted address and Clemen's monogram in red. TWAIN IN THE MIDST OF WRITING "TOM SAWYER" A remarkable letter and one of Clemens most explicit descriptions of the writing of Tom Sawyer ; he gives a detailed description of the Elmira farm and his studio, and sends a set of photographs (no longer present) showing his family and the farm. "I have been writing fifty pages of manuscript a day, on an average, for sometime now, on a book (a story) & consequently have been so wrapped up in it & so dead to to everything else, that I have fallen mighty short in letter-writing. But night before last I discovered that that day's chapter was a failure, in conception, moral, truth to nature & execution -- enough blemished to impair the excellence of almost any chapter- and so, I must burn up the day's work & do it all over again. It was plain that I had worked myself out, pumped myself dry. So I knocked off, & went to playing billiards for a change. I haven't had an idea or fancy for two days, now - an excellent time to write to friends who have plenty of ideas & fancies of their own & so will prefer an offering of the heart before those of the head. Day after tomorrow I go to a neighboring city to see a five-act drama of mine brought out [a dramatization of his and Gilder's The Gilded Age ], & suggest amendments in it; & would about as soon spend a night in the Spanish Inquisition as sit there & be tortured with all the adverse criticisms I can contrive to imagine the audience is indulging in. But whether the play be successful or not, I hope I shall never fell obliged to see it performed a second time. My interest in my work dies a sudden & violent death when the work is done. "I have invented & patented a pretty good sort of a scrap-book (I think,) but I have backed down from letting it be known as mine just at present -- for I can't stand being under discussion on a play & a scrap -- book at one & the same time! I shall be away two days, & then return & take our tribe to New York, where we shall remain 5 days buying furniture for the new house [the Hartford home, designed by Edward Tuckerman Potter was nearly completed] & then go to Hartford & settle solidly down for the winter. After that fallow time I ought to be able to go to work again on the book. We shall reach Hartford about the middle of September, I judge. "We have spent the past four months up here on top of a breezy hill six hundred feet high, some few miles from Elmira, N.Y., & overlooking that town,; (Elmira is my wife's birth-place, & that of Susie & the new baby [Clara]). This little summer home on the hill top (named Quarry Farm because there's a quarry on it,) belongs to my wife's sister, Mrs. Crane. "A photographer came up the other day & wanted to make some views, & I shall send you the result per this mail. My study is a snug little octagonal den, with a coal-grate, 6 big windows, one little one, & a wide doorway (the latter opening upon the distant town.) On hot days I spreadthe study wide open, anchor my papers down with brick-bats & write in the midst of hurricanes, clothed in the same thin linen we make shirt bosoms of. The study is nearly on the peak of the hill; it is right in fron of the little perpendicular wall of rock left where they used to quarry stone. On the peak of the hill is an old arbor roofed with bark & covered with the vine you call the "American creeper" -- its green is already bloodied with red. The study...is remote from all noise. "The group picture represents the vine-clad carriage-way in front of the farm-h