Samuel Langhorne Clemens Collection

The Samuel Langhorne Clemens Collection provides insight into the life and career of Clemens, American author and lecturer best known by his pseudonym Mark Twain. The collection is comprised of correspondence, writings, contracts, scrapbooks, clippings, and printed material.

The collection contains drafts, research notes, printed versions, and contracts, which document Clemens' creative process and writing career. Autograph manuscripts can be found in the collection for The Gilded Age, My Debut as a Literary Person, Clemens' translation of Der Struwwelpeter into English, and A Tramp Abroad. Very few of Clemens' autograph manuscripts represent the entirety of a work; due to his popularity among collectors many of his manuscripts were divided and gifted or sold separately. As the collection illustrates, Clemens was deeply concerned with his intellectual property rights, as can be seen in his contracts with publishers and efforts to obtain passage of an international copyright law. Original illustrations for Puddn'head Wilson and A Tramp Abroad can also be found in the collection.

Correspondence with various authors and publishers, including the American Publishing Company, Elisha Bliss, Richard Watson Gilder, Annie Trumbull Slosson, and Joseph Hopkins Twichell, also shed light into Clemens' professional life. Much of the correspondence was removed from printed material. The collection also contains correspondence of collectors Willard Samuel Morse and Walter Francis Frear.

Clemens' celebrity status is evident in a number of items in the collection, such as autographs, a collection of "Some Finger Prints of Mark Twain, Frederic Remington, Joseph Jefferson, and Others," souvenir menus for dinners held in his honor, a bas relief of Clemens and George Cable, and blueprints for a plaque placed on the home where Clemens lived while residing in London, England.