career but are rather a continuation of the sketch writing he had begun in the West. To his brother Orion he referred to it as “periodical dancing before the public.”
It was the success of the Innocents as well as the strain of producing sketches on schedule that would turn Mark Twain to other kinds of writing, although he continued to write a few sketches. He declared to a correspondent on March 3, 1871, that he was determined to write no more for periodicals but instead to write books. He made a similar protest in print, as an introduction to “My First Literary Venture.” Accordingly, most of the later short pieces, until the 1890s, are properly stories or essays, such as the damning attack on Commodore Vanderbilt he published in Packard’s Monthly in March 1869.49 By the late 1890s, the writer looked back at his early work with distaste. “I find that I cannot stand things I wrote a quarter of a century ago. They seem to have two qualities, gush and vulgarity.” The pieces are decidedly uneven, but a few, such as “Some Learned Fables” and “Aurelia’s Unfortunate Young Man,” are still amusing and deserve more attention than they have customarily received.
Strange as it may seem, Mark Twain’s writings after he went east had much wider publication in book form in England than in the United States; this was due partly to the activities of literary pirates, who gathered his pieces without authorization from the writer or his American publishers. Two thin volumes, Eye Openers and Screamers, collected Express, Galaxy, and other sketches in 1871. Besides other small volumes, a fat collection of sixty-six pieces was published by Routledge in 1872 as Mark Twain’s Sketches; this one was, however, authorized. In it a prefatory note from the author states, “This book contains all of my sketches which I feel willing to father.” Although he himself prepared this volume for publication, he used the versions of his work that had appeared in England in 1871 as the basis for the printer’s copy of a number of the pieces, despite the fact that these versions had been heavily edited by the unauthorized publisher, John Camden Hotten. Hotten himself drew attention to this strange practice of accepting a stranger’s unsought editing in a letter to the English journal Spectator published June 8, after the 1872 Sketches was published. He noted, for example, that he had found a “rather strongly-worded article entitled ‘Journalism in Tennessee’” likely to profit from the elimination of “certain forcible expressions,” such as “bumming his board” and “animated tank of mendacity, gin, and profanity”; and so he performed the pruning.50 Now in an authorized edition the same changes had appeared.
Hotten later published a volume of 107 sketches, along with the Innocents, combined as The Choice Humorous Works of Mark Twain (1873). After Hotten died in June 1873, he was succeeded by the man who was to become Mark Twain’s authorized publisher, Andrew Chatto, whose firm became Chatto and Windus. Chatto obligingly gave the American writer the opportunity to revise his work, and he did so, deleting seventeen sketches and making revisions. In 1874, The Choice Humorous Works appeared, “Revised and Corrected by the Author.” None of these volumes appeared in the uniform edition the writer assembled toward the end of his career. Only Sketches, New and Old serves there to represent his early work.
Although Mark Twain was resolved to concentrate on writing books after 1871, just what he would undertake next was not clear to him for a time. In July 1866, he had recorded an idea in his notebook: “Conversation between the carpenters of Noah’s Ark, laughing at him for an old visionary.”51 In August 1869, he asked his sister to send him his “account of the Deluge (it is a diary kept by Shem),” which he described as being of “70 or 80 pages.” When he wrote to Elisha Bliss about it in January 1870, he called it a “Noah’s Ark” book. He supposed, with hope, that “maybe it will be several years before it is all written—but it will be a perfect lightning striker when it is done.” Although he returned to this work at the end of his life, only partial drafts survive.52 In 1939, Bernard DeVoto prepared for publication Mark Twain manuscripts he called “Papers of the Adam Family,” eventually published in 1962 in the collection Letters from the Earth. Rather more to the point is a letter written to Mrs. Fairbanks a little earlier. Here he explained that the success of the Innocents had so encouraged him that he intended “to write another book during the summer.”
The popularity of the Innocents was to have a great effect on Mark Twain’s career. In the preface to the second volume of an English edition of the work, he described his modest expectations. “I did not seriously expect anybody to buy the book when it was originally written—and that will account for a good deal of its chirping complacency and freedom from restraint: the idea that nobody is listening, is apt to seduce a body into airing his small thoughts with a rather juvenile frankness.”
In March 1870, following his marriage, Clemens was still thinking about a book. He had decided, he wrote the Langdons, that his activities at the Express would be limited to writing only “one or two sketches a month”; that chore and his work for the Galaxy occupied him “fully only six days every month.” He needed time, he explained, “to write a book in.” One of his Express pieces, published in April, was about the West, “The Facts in the Great Landslide Case,” and in May he wrote to Mrs. Fairbanks that since his publishers wanted another book, “I doubt if I could do better than rub up old Pacific memories & put them between covers along with some eloquent pictures.” For this purpose he expected to go west with Olivia. But he did not commit himself to a book until July 15, when he signed a contract with Bliss while he was in Elmira, New York, where Jervis Langdon, Olivia’s father, was fatally ill. Langdon had accepted Clemens and given him the vital reassurance that it was possible for a wealthy, respectable person to be principled and upright.53
He contracted to complete the book in less than six months and immediately began preparation by writing to Orion about their journey to Nevada in 1861. “I propose to do up Nevada & Cal., beginning with the trip across the country in the stage.” This time he had no rough draft, similar to his Alta letters from Europe, to get him started. But he was excited and optimistic, since he was getting the biggest royalty “ever paid on a subscription book in this country,” 7.5 percent.
Like the Innocents, the book that Mark Twain was to write about the West belongs to a special class, addressed to a specific readership. The American Publishing Company sold its books not in stores but through agents, who sought subscribers in advance of actual publication by showing a prospectus and sample selections by door-to-door canvassing, The typical buyer lived in a small town and was without access to a bookstore. Such a reader wanted, or it was supposed by such publishers that he wanted, big books with many pictures. (The Innocents Abroad had 234 illustrations—many not freshly prepared for the book.) Purportedly he did not seek “literature” but information. The typical subscription book therefore was nonfiction, often a first-person narrative with some kind of current appeal. Appearance too was important: several styles of bindings, usually with illustrations on the cover, were offered. William Dean Howells had pointed to the importance of appropriate illustrations in his review of The Innocents Abroad, although he had later observed that “no book of quality was made to go by subscription except Mr. Clemens’s books, and I think they went because the subscription public never knew what good literature they were.”54 Most authors with literary pretensions had no use for such books. In the city, Howells knew, agents were “a nuisance and a bore,” “a proverb of the undesirable.”55 But the success of the Innocents not surprisingly prompted Mark Twain to undertake another lengthy subscription book, even though by the time he had finished his first he had complained in June 1869 to Mrs. Fairbanks that he had “lost very nearly all my interest in it long ago.” He judged—as he wrote “Uncle Remus,” Joel Chandler Harris, in 1881—“When a book will sell by subscription, it will sell two or three times as many copies as it would in the trade; and the profit is bulkier because the retail price is greater.”
Mark Twain had come to understand that the appeal of a subscription book did not depend wholly on the author. He told his publisher, Bliss, that he would “write a book that will sell
