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Grolier Club Exhibitions

Twain and the Popular Press

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Twain’s roots are in the popular press: frontier newspapers in the West and dime novels and penny papers in New York were among the first to publish his writing. Twain continued to publish serially throughout his career, and as his fame grew, he expanded to high-end literary journals, children’s magazines, and more. Twain’s name and image became selling points for these periodicals, helping to sell copies while simultaneously enhancing his popularity and prominence.

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Kelley’s Weekly, A Journal of the Times, volume 1, number 1. New York: A. A. Kelley & Co., November 30, 1867.  

Kelley’s Weekly—a rare and presumably short-lived New York publication styled after Harper’s Weekly—featured an early reprint of Mark Twain’s “A Yankee in the Orient” (first published in the New-York Daily Tribune on October 25) in its debut issue.  

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The Overland Monthly, volume 1. San Francisco: A. Roman & Company, 1868. 

The first four issues of this early Californian periodical contained sketches by Twain, all of which were later incorporated into The Innocents Abroad 

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Weidlich Brothers. Mark Twain bookends. [Bridgeport, Conn.]: W[eidlich] B[rothers], [ca. 1947].  

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The Galaxy, volume 10, number 3. New York: Sheldon & Co., September 1870. In original wrappers. 

Clemens was given artistic license to start a humor department for William C. and Francis P. Church’s monthly magazine The Galaxy; his resulting “Memoranda” was a feature of every issue and advertised on many of the front wrappers: “MARK TWAIN, the Great Humorist, writes for The Galaxy, every month.”  

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Samuel L. Clemens. Autograph letter signed (“Clemens”) to Elisha Bliss, Jr. Buffalo, N.Y., October 26, 1870. 

Elisha Bliss, president of Clemens’s publisher the American Publishing Company, considered The Galaxy a competitor, and requested that the author stop writing for it. In this letter Clemens denies the request, contending that “it is good advertising for me—as you show when you desire me to quit.” 

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Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, volume 34, number 199. New York: Harper & Brothers, December 1866.  

This issue of Harper’s contains Twain’s first print appearance in a national magazine: “Forty-Three Days in an Open Boat,” a retelling of his account of the shipwreck of the Hornet in his first big break as a journalist. The text is expanded from “Letter to Honolulu,” written for the Sacramento Union earlier the same year. Harper’s amusingly misspelled Twain’s name; he is credited here as “Mark Swain.” 

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The Atlantic Monthly: A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics, volume 35, numbers 207. Boston: James R. Osgood, January 1875.  

The New England literary magazine The Atlantic, founded by abolitionist James Russell Lowell in 1857, published Twain’s memoir “Old Times on the Mississippi”over these seven issues in 1875. Twain later expanded upon these pieces in his 1883 travel book Life on the Mississippi.

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Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, volume 90, number 539. New York: Harper & Brothers, April 1895. 

Twain’s “Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc” was serialized in thirteen issues of the prominent New York magazine Harper’s Monthly. Because the text was intended as serious, Clemens wanted it to appear anonymously, but Harper’s advertised the serial as being written by “one of the most successful among American writers of fiction,” and the initial installments appeared under the byline of “the Sieur Louis de Conte”—a name that conceals Clemens’s initials. 

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The Day’s Doings: An Illustrated Journal of Romantic Events, Reports, Sporting & Theatrical News, at Home & Abroad, volumes 1–2. London: W. D. Waller, July 30, 1870–July 23, 1871.  

The sensational and richly illustrated English magazine The Day’s Doings reprinted Mark Twain’s “Map of Paris” (first printed in his own magazine The Buffalo Express) in the November 5, 1870, issue. Twain teasingly laments that he forgot to engrave the image in reverse, “so that it reads wrong-end first, except to left-handed people.”  

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Prospectus for St. Nicholas for Young Folks, volume 20, number 12. New York: The Century Company, November 1893. 

Mary Mapes Dodge, the founding editor of the children’s magazine St. Nicholas, advertised Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer Abroad in this prospectus for the November 1893 issue. Ironically, she severely revised the story to the point of bowdlerization, removing references she deemed offensive and elevating Huck Finn’s dialect, much to Twain’s infuriation.  

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Edward Penfield. Poster advertisement for the September 1895 issue of Harper’s. [New York: Harper & Brothers, 1895.] 

Mark Twain’s article “Mental Telegraphy Again” is prominently featured in this striking advertisement for Harper’s magazine. 

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Joza Krupka. Bronze bust of Mark Twain. [New York]: Armor Bronze, 1912. 

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Sunday Magazine of the St. Louis Republic, part 6. St. Louis: Associated Sunday Magazines, October 27, 1907.  

This Sunday supplement to The St. Louis Republic reprinted The North American Review’s selections from The Autobiography of Mark Twain in 1907, as did the Sunday Magazine for many other journals around the nation. 

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Life, volume 65, number 25. Chicago: Time, Inc., December 20, 1968. 

The unfinished Tom and Huck Among the Indians was printed for the first time by Henry Luce’s Life magazine in 1968, with illustrations by James McMullan.