The Mysterious Stranger: A Romance.

TWAIN, Mark. [Samuel L. Clemens]. With Illustrations by N.C. Wyeth.

Item Number: 120488

New York and London: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1916.

First edition, first issue of Twain’s of three stories with K-Q on the copyright page. Octavo, original cloth with color pictorial onlay, illustrated with seven colored plates by N.C. Wyeth including tissue-guarded frontispiece. With an autograph letter signed by and entirely in the hand of Mark Twain tipped in which reads in full, “Everett House, May 23. My Dear Mr. Skinner: I thank you very much for sending the article. I am glad you were moved to write it. I wish we might get the reform started. It ought not to be difficult to do; & once started, I believe it would go. Sincerely Yours, S.L. Clemens. I apologize for the envelope. It is midnight & this is the last one in stock.” The recipient, Charles M. Skinner was editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Additionally, with a clipping of a parcel mailing address in the hand of N.C. Wyeth which reads, “from N.C. Wyeth Chadds Ford PA –. FIRST CLASS” indicating it was at one time sent by him as a gift from his home in Chadds Ford. In fine condition. An exceptional example with fine provenance.

Twain worked on The Mysterious Stranger intermittently from 1897 through 1908 and it remained unfinished, after several drafts, at the time of his death. A collection of three uncompleted sketches, The Chronicle of Little Satan, Schoolhouse Hill, and No. 44, the work was compiled and embellished by Clemens’s literary executor, Albert Bigelow Paine, and Frederick Duneka, an editor at Harper's. This literary deception was not exposed until the publication, in 1963, of John S. Tuckey’s Mark Twain and Little Satan: The Writing of the Mysterious Stranger, which revolutionized the study of the last decade of Clemens’s life and work.