I think the letter Bob refers to is the one Mark Twain wrote Mary
Fairbanks, 25 Feb 1874, in which he says the reason she doesn't like The
Gilded Age enough is because she's been reading the wrong chapters.
Here's what he says:
""I think you don’t like the Gilded Age,—but that’s because you’ve been
reading Warner’schapters. I wrote chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9,
10, 11, 24, 25, 27, 28, 30, 32, 33, 34, 36, 37, 42, 43, 45, first three
or four pages of 49,—also chapters 51, 52, 53, 57, 59, 60, 61, 62, &
portions of 35 & 56. You read those!
This is one of the many letters available at the Mark Twain Project's
wonderful site. The URL of the Project's site is
"http://www.marktwainproject.org/" Steve Railton, Univ of Virginia
On 12/20/2011 2:00 PM, [log in to unmask] wrote:
> Sometime back around 1960, Charles Neider did a book called The =
> Adventures of Colonel Sellers, which purported to be just the parts of =
> The Gilded Age written by Mark Twain. In the introduction, he quoted a =
> couple of letters in which Twain listed which chapters (or parts of =
> chapters) were his. The last time I read The Gilded Age, about 25 years =
> ago, I copied down those two lists (which didn=E2=80=99t agree 100 =
> percent, but close enough) and kept them handy, so when I read a certain =
> section that involved Sellers but didn=E2=80=99t sound quite Twainish I =
> could check and see whether it was or not.
>
> I=E2=80=99m reading The Gilded Age again right now, and just today I =
> went to the university library to recopy those lists =E2=80=93 but the =
> Neider book isn=E2=80=99t there any more. So my question is, does =
> anybody have one or both of those lists handy?
>
> -- Bob G.
|