| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |
| 1 | 314 | 629 | 943 | 1257 |
|
VOLUME I
By Mark Twain
MARK TWAIN'S LETTERS
I. EARLY LETTERS, 1853. NEW YORK AND PHILADELPHIA
We have no record of Mark Twain's earliest letters. Very likely
they were soiled pencil notes, written to some school sweetheart
--to "Becky Thatcher," perhaps--and tossed across at lucky moments,
or otherwise, with happy or disastrous results. One of those
smudgy, much-folded school notes of the Tom Sawyer period would be
priceless to-day, and somewhere among forgotten keepsakes it may
exist, but we shall not be likely to find it. No letter of his
boyhood, no scrap of his earlier writing, has come to light except
his penciled name, SAM CLEMENS, laboriously inscribed on the inside
of a small worn purse that once held his meager, almost non-existent
wealth. He became a printer's apprentice at twelve, but as he
received no salary, the need of a purse could not have been urgent.
He must have carried it pretty steadily, however, from its
2
Page
Quick Jump
|