Mark Twain and Edgar Watson Howe have three points of contact:


1.  When Ed Howe self-published The Story of a Country Town (1883), he sent a copy of it to Mark Twain.  Twain wrote Howe a letter of enthusiastic praise and gave permission to Howe to quote it.  Lytle Biggs, one of the characters in the novel, speaks in satiric quips which foreshadow Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894).


2.  In 1885 the New York World jocularly proposed that Twain should run for president, with Howe as his vice-president.


3.  In Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) Twain briefly describes a circus performance in which a pretended drunken man performs amazing stunts while standing on the back of a trotting horse and is then revealed as a circus performer.  In Howe' autobiography, Plain People (1929) he describes having seen just such a performance in the Miles Orton Circus, which played in Bethany, MO, in about 1863; Howe's short story "When the Circus Came to Town," which appeared in the American Magazine in 1911 and was reprinted as "Doctor Gilkerson" in The Anthology of Another Town (1920), describes the same performance.


When I was assigned to write the Twayne United States Authors Series volume on E.W. Howe, there was no full-length biography of Howe in existence except for his own autobiography, which I thought might not be sufficiently detailed or reliable.  Calder Pickett's biography had not been published.  So I set to work accumulating the information to write a biography.


In 1965 I went to Bethany, where Howe grew up, and to nearby Fairview, where his father was preacher.  I spent several days in Atchison, KS, interviewing people who had known Howe -- and discovering that most of them wouldn't talk to Pickett because he had offended them by an article on Howe he had written.  I spent many hours in the office of the Atchison Globe reading the files of the paper when Howe had edited it.  I had an extensive correspondence with Howe's son, the late Jim Howe; I spoke many times with Howe's niece, Adelaide Howe, who had been his housekeeper and was living then in the house Howe had lived in.  I acquired photocopies of all of Howe's correspondence then available.  I read everything Howe had published.  I scoured all available secondary sources.


And then I wrote the biography, about 200 pages long.  But the TUSAS format limited me to 25 pages of biography, so I condensed what I had.  Pickett's biography came out in 1968, and I was disappointed.  He had not done more than half the research I had done, and he made the incorrect assumption that Howe had not changed his opinions in the 84 years of his life.  His book was badly organized and poorly written.  But since it existed, there was not then any possibility that I could publish my full-length biography.  My TUSAS volume came out in 1972.


Recently I made an effort to find a publisher for my biography, since Pickett's was out of print.  Nobody was interested.  Mine still needs more tidying up, but there's no point in working further on it since I cannot publish it.  So I have decided to make my draft available, free and uncopyrighted, to anyone who might want to read it.  If you'd like to have a copy, e-mail me at [log in to unmask], and I'll send it to you as an e-mail attachment.


You can download it and read it as an e-book, you can print it off and bind it, you can forward it to people you know who might be interested.  If you are a library, you can catalog it as an e-book, or you can print it and put it on your shelves.
 
Sam Sackett


http://samsackett.us

http://about.me/www.samsackett.com