Mark Twain's wit fetches nearly 1 million dollars at auction

Jun 18, 2010, 13:58 GMT

New York - A never-published manuscript long considered the missing chapter of American humorist Mark Twain's autobiography fetched 242,500 dollars on the auction block Thursday.

The document was one of about 100 writings from the life of writer born Samuel Langhorne Clemens that were sold for nearly 1 million dollars at Sothebys New York. He is best known for the novels The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer with their tales of life along the Mississippi River of the late 1800s.

The 65-page A Family Sketch, the highlight of the auction, had been estimated at only one-half to two-thirds the amount it received from a bidder.

It was written as a tribute to his daughter, Susy, who died of meningitis at age 24 in 1896, sending Twain into a period of depression that deepened with the death of his wife, Olivia, in 1904.

Another daughter died at age 29 in the year before Twain's own death in 1910.

The manuscript is one of his most intimate and introspective memoirs of his family and his own boyhood days, according to Sothebys. Most of his published autobiographical narrative contained general commentary on society and people he had met.

Other items in the auction included autographed photographs and scribbled-on pages of manuscripts that were finally published.

Item 522, for example, which fetched 10,000 dollars, was a particularly biting letter to a Mrs Walter Littlewood, who along with her husband was in charge of an institution for the blind in England.

The letter, showing Twain's contempt for conventional religion, responds to a remark Mrs Littlewood made about 'Jesus books.'

'That's a darling expression, the 'Jesus' books!' It gives us a private view of whole London Vaults of bottled resentment,' Clemens wrote. 'What a small business it is the persecution of the helpless. Religious people do know so many ways of being disagreeable. It makes me dread to go to hell; but I suppose there is no way to get around it.'

Twain took his name from an expression he learned as a Mississippi riverboat captain, 'mark twain,' which was called out when the leadsman measuring the river depth found it was at least two fathoms (4 metres) deep and safe for most boats at that time.

The fact that Clemens' bits and pieces of writing would fetch so much money a century after his death would likely not only have pleased the author, who took pride in his literary recognition, but also tickled his sense of the absurd. Once, when there were reports he had died, Twain was quoted as saying the rumors were 'exaggerated.'

Another letter, showing his famous wit, dated 1894, admonishes the recipient to 'endeavour to so live that when you come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.'

The papers were sold by the James S Copley Library at the University of San Diego, and were part of a larger auction of documents collected by Copley, a reporter, editor and member of the Copley publishing family.