(Mark Twain did not distrust his daughter so much as he doubted her ability to withstand avaricious suitors.)Ĭlara could not sell the papers or even give them away without the consent of her trustees: she could only transfer ownership through her own will. Mark Twain's will assigned all his property to his only surviving daughter, Clara Clemens Gabrilowitsch (later Samossoud), with the important provision that it be held in trust to provide income for her. It contains more than 500 literary manuscripts left unpublished and in various states of completion, including ten or eleven file feet of both handwritten and dictated (and mostly unpublished) autobiography 46 out of 50 extant notebooks some 17,000 letters to Clemens or his family about 3,000 letters by him roughly 100 books from his library as well as uncounted clippings, contracts, bills, checks, photographs, scrapbooks, and other family artifacts. The largest single archive of original documents by and about Mark Twain is known as the Mark Twain Papers.

For all but two of his major books the original manuscript survives. There are also hundreds of literary manuscripts-books, stories, essays-that he published and then abandoned or gave away. There are, in fact, in hundreds of libraries and private collections around the world, at least 9,000 of his personal and business letters (one-fifth of the 50,000 letters he is believed to have written) with more still being found every week. There is free speech there, and no harm to the family.”Ĭlemens also changed his mind about “unpublished letters of Mark Twain.” By the time of his death he had signed a contract to have at least of some of them published. “I will leave it behind,” he said of one such essay in 1905, “and utter it from the grave. He had also written hundreds of thousands of words that he did not publish, but also did not destroy, expecting many of them to be published after his death. By the time of his death in 1910, he had published more than thirty books and pamphlets, and easily three or four thousand newspaper and magazine articles. Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835, put an astonishing number of words on paper. “ You had better shove this in the stove-for if we strike a bargain I don't want any absurd ‘literary remains’ & ‘unpublished letters of Mark Twain’ published after I am planted.” -Letter to Orion and Mollie Clemens, 19 and 20 October 1865

Letters from hawaii by mark twain