1. Letter dated 25 January 1871; holograph in Katharine S. Day Collection, Stowe-Day Library, Hartford, Connecticut.

2. For a useful gathering of materials relating to the Elmira community and Clemens's association with it, see Mark Twain in Elmira , ed. Robert D. Jerome and Herbert A. Wisbey, Jr. (Elmira, N.Y.: Mark Twain Society, 1977).

3. See chap. 9.

4. See chap. 8.

5. Letter dated 4 August 1869; holograph in MTP.

6. Holograph letter in MTP.

7. Holograph manuscript (DV79) in MTP.

8. Within a few years, when they had made it their summer home, the Cranes were inspired by the freedom and informality of Quarry Farm to christen it "Go-as-you-please Hall," in a way perpetuating those aspects of the place Clemens had earlier mined. In 1874, after the Crane and Clemens families had taken over the house at the farm as a summer retreat, Susan Crane surprised her brother-in-law by having an octagonal study built for him on a nearby crest of land, thus recapitulating the circumstances that had drawn him to the farm in the first place by allowing him an amiable escape from domestic cares and distractions.

9. The only surviving record of Goodman's criticism, apparently, is Paine's. He credits Goodman with reviving Clemens's confidence by reviewing the manuscript of Roughing It and pronouncing it "a great book!" Mark Twain: A Biography , 1:435-36.

10. Holograph letter in MTP.

11. The full publication history of Mark Twain's (Burlesque) Autobiography is given in The Works of Mark Twain: Early Tales & Sketches , Volume 1, 1851-1864 , ed. Edgar Marquess Branch and Robert H. Hirst (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1979), pp. 561-71. Branch and Hirst observe that "reviews were relatively scarce, invariably brief, and, with few exceptions, negative in tone," citing a number of contemporary instances. The Chicago Tribune , e.g., judged that "the work is not up to Twain's average of humor, and suggests, perhaps, that the well has been pumped too long." Godey's Lady's Book and Magazine imagined that "the necessity of making a book must have borne very heavily upon him to compel him to send before the public such a collection of weak jokes and mild witticisms as this." Boston's Literary World maintained that the author's name aroused the "suspicion that the work is one of humor; but the book itself affords not the feeblest fibre of corroboration" (pp. 568-69).

12. See chap. 9. break

13. Letter dated 17 May 1871; holograph in MTP.

14. Paine mentions other self-inflicted distractions from the same period, including Clemens's plan to co-write a book with Goodman, his beginning a western play, and his inventing and patenting an adjustable vest strap. Mark Twain: A Biography , 1:440.

15. These observations tie into and benefit from fuller discussions of the initiation motif in Roughing It and of Clemens's presentation of the West in the book. See, in particular, Henry Nash Smith, Mark Twain: The Development of a Writer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962), pp. 52-70, and "Mark Twain as an Interpreter of the Far West: The Structure of Roughing It ," in The Frontier in Perspective , ed. Walker D. Wyman and Clifton B. Kroeber (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1957), pp. 210-25. Smith argues that the book's narrator is initiated into a system of western vernacular values which ultimately prove unsatisfying. Hamlin Hill agrees essentially with Smith and extends his judgments to include Clemens's personal circumstances and his implied critique of the American Dream. " Roughing It ," he says, "is Mark Twain's renunciation of his footloose bachelorhood [and] his rejection of that myth of the frontier West that obsessed the American imagination in the nineteenth century." Introduction to Roughing It (New York: Penguin Books, 1981), p. 19. Hill also acknowledges William M. Gibson's assertion that a primary theme of the book is "that luck is for the lucky, who are few, and that work and a vocation are for the many, of whom Mark Twain counted himself one." The Art of Mark Twain (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 35. William C. Spengemann cites the narrator's eventual disillusionment with the West as an instance of Twain's exploiting the tension between ''adventure" and "domesticity." The Adventurous Muse: The Poetics of American Fiction, 1789-1900 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1977), p. 217. James M. Cox dissents, in a way, maintaining that the narrator is never truly initiated but rather is made to experience the same western disillusionment over and over. Mark Twain: The Fate of Humor (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), p. 98.