Clemens, Samuel Langhorne

The Mysterious Stranger. New York and London: Harper and Brothers, 1916

In 8s (9 1/8 x 7 in.; 232 x 178 mm). Color-printed frontispiece and 6 plates after N. C. Wyeth. Publisher's black cloth, front cover panelled and lettered in gilt with large color-printed pictorial onlay; extremities lightly worn.

Merle Johnson (signature and bibliographical note, in pencil, on front free endpaper) — Nick Karanovich (sale, Sotheby’s New York, 19 June 2003, lot 137)

BAL 3520; Johnson, pp. 94–95; Lilly/Karanovich 115

First edition, first issue, with the publisher’s code K-Q below the copyright. The Mysterious Stranger was presented as a completed work left unpublished at the author’s death, but it was in fact a pastiche of three separate, uncompleted sketches (“The Chronicle of Little Satan”; “Schoolhouse Hill”; and “No. 44, the Mysterious Stranger”) cobbled together by Clemens’s literary executor, Albert Bigelow Paine, and Frederick Duneka,  an editor at Harper's. Paine and Duneka excised about a quarter of “The Chronicle of Little Satan,” incorporated passages and characters from the other versions, and invented the character of the astrologer, who appears in Wyeth’s front-cover illustration. The literary deception was not exposed until the publication, in 1963, of John S. Tuckey’s Mark Twain and Little Satan: The Writing of the Mysterious Stranger, which revolutionized the study of the last decade of Clemens’s life and work.

The present copy may have been sent as a gift by the illustrator: mounted to the front pastedown is a neat portion of brown parcel paper reading "from N. C. Wyeth | Chadds Ford | Pa | First Class." Mounted to the front free endpaper is an autograph letter signed by Clemens ("S. L. Clemens"), 1 1/2 pages, Everett House, 23 May [no year], to a Mr. Skinner, which might refer to his interest in simplified spelling: "I thank you very much for sending the article. I am glad you were moved to write it. I wish we might get the reform started. It ought not to be difficult to do; & once started, I believe it would go." Victor Fischer of the Mark Twain Project, the Bancroft Library, has suggested that Clemens's correspondent could have been Charles M. Skinner, editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle.