Mark Twain's Letters — Volume 3 (1876-1885)

This volume captures Mark Twain at the height of his powers, corresponding candidly with his closest literary confidant, W.D. Howells. The years 1876-1885 were remarkably fertile: Tom Sawyer just published to acclaim, the Monday Evening Club humming with intellectual energy in Hartford, collaborations with Bret Harte underway. But what makes these letters indispensable is what lies beneath the surface wit. Here is Twain the working writer obsessing over sentence structure, begging for Howells's honest critical eye, wrestling with self-doubt even as the public adores him. Here too are the small human details: health complaints, family matters, the everyday texture of a life lived in letters. These are not the later, darker Twain of financial ruin and personal tragedy, but the man at his most unguarded and vital, applying to his own correspondence the same merciless precision he brought to his fiction. For anyone seeking to understand how a great American voice was forged in privacy and friendship, there is no better primary source.