The Numismatic Bibliomania Society

PREV ARTICLE       NEXT ARTICLE       FULL ISSUE       PREV FULL ISSUE      

V18 2015 INDEX       E-SYLUM ARCHIVE

The E-Sylum: Volume 18, Number 49, December 6, 2015, Article 20

QUIZ ANSWER: MARK TWAIN AT THE SAN FRANCISCO MINT

Last week I asked, “According one of his writer friends, [Mark] Twain's writing career got off the ground in a decidedly numismatic location. Who was his friend and where did their conversation take place?”

Well, although we mentioned this once before in The E-Sylum, no one ventured a guess. Twain’s friend was writer Bret Harte, and the location was Harte’s office at the San Francisco Mint. Below is an excerpt from Bret Harte by Henry Boynton, New York, 1903, p22-25. -Editor

Among the casual presences attracted by that old California was a certain Sam Clemens who had begun to write over the signature of Mark Twain but had received no general recognition. Curiously enough it was through Bret Harte and The Californian that his first hit was made. A month after their first meeting Mr Clemens called on Harte, who tells this story:

“He had been away in the mining districts on some newspaper assignment in the meantime. In the course of conversation he remarked that the unearthly laziness that prevailed in the town he had been visiting was beyond anything in his previous experience. He said the men did nothing all day long but sit around the bar room stove spit and ‘swop lies.’ He spoke in a slow, rather satirical drawl, which was in itself irresistible. He went on to tell one of those extravagant stories and half unconsciously dropped into the lazy tone and manner of the original narrator.

I asked him to tell it again to a friend who came in and then asked him to write it out for The Californian. He did so and when published it was an emphatic success. It was the first work of his that had attracted general attention and it crossed the Sierras for an Eastern reading. The story was ‘The Jumping Frog of Calaveras.’ It is now known and laughed over I suppose wherever the English tongue is spoken but it will never be as funny to anyone in print as it was to me, told for the first time by the unknown Twain himself on that morning in the San Francisco Mint.”

Bret Harte was at this time secretary to the superintendent of the United States Mint and also had a place upon the staff of The Golden Era to which upon the collapse of The Californian Mark Twain became a frequent contributor. Most of Harte's own work during this period was purely journalistic in effect though he had already produced prose and verse of a literary quality.

To read the complete book on Google Books, see:
https://books.google.com/books?id=hshaAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA22#v=onepage&f=false

To read the earlier E-Sylum articles, see:
HOLABIRD-KAGIN AMERICANA WESTERN STATES TOKEN AUCTION MARCH 2012 (www.coinbooks.org/esylum_v15n13a16.html)
QUIZ ANSWER: THE HARTE-TWAIN NUMISMATIC CONNECTION (www.coinbooks.org/esylum_v15n14a09.html)

Kolbe-Fanning website ad6


Wayne Homren, Editor

Google
 
NBS (coinbooks.org) Web

The Numismatic Bibliomania Society is a non-profit organization promoting numismatic literature. See our web site at coinbooks.org.

To submit items for publication in The E-Sylum, write to the Editor at this address: whomren@gmail.com

To subscribe go to: https://my.binhost.com/lists/listinfo/esylum

PREV ARTICLE       NEXT ARTICLE       FULL ISSUE       PREV FULL ISSUE      

V18 2015 INDEX       E-SYLUM ARCHIVE

Copyright © 1998 - 2020 The Numismatic Bibliomania Society (NBS)
All Rights Reserved.

NBS Home Page
Contact the NBS webmaster
coin