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truth I have never done that. Do you care for trifles of information?
Well, then, "Tom Sawyer" and "The Prince and the Pauper" were each
(
on the stocks two or three years, and "Old Times on the Mississippi"
eight.) One of my unfinished books has been on the stocks sixteen years;
another seventeen. This latter book could have been finished in a day,
at any time during the past five years. But as in the first of these two
narratives all the action takes place in Noah's ark, and as in the other
the action takes place in heaven, there seemed to be no hurry, and so I
have not hurried. Tales of stirring adventure in those localities do
not need to be rushed to publication lest they get stale by waiting. In
twenty-one years, with all my time at my free disposal I have written
and completed only eleven books, whereas with half the labor that
a journalist does I could have written sixty in that time. I do not
greatly mind being accused of a proclivity for rushing into print, but
at the same time I don't believe that the charge is really well founded.
Suppose I did write eleven books, have you nothing to be grateful for?
Go to---remember the forty-nine which I didn't write.
Truly Yours
S. L. CLEMENS.
Notes (added twenty-two years later):
Stormfield, April 30, 1909. It seems the letter was not sent. I probably
feared she might print it, and I couldn't find a way to say so without
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