Mark Twain in the Magazines

Mark Twain began his writing career as a journalist, contributing sketches and travel correspondence to a variety of newspapers. As magazines emerged as a major publishing force in the second half of the 19th century, demand rose for text to fill an ever expanding assortment of popular periodicals. Samuel Clemens and many of his contemporaries took advantage of the opportunities offered by this favorable writer’s market.

Magazines were good business for Mark Twain. The first of his stories to appear in a national magazine was “43 Days in an Open Boat” for Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in December 1866. In the early 1870s, he contributed over eighty pieces to The Galaxy, briefly a major national magazine. The Galaxy paid him $20 per page for his monthly column—more than double its regular rate. His writings appeared regularly in all the most prominent periodicals of the era: The Atlantic Monthly, The Century Illustrated Monthly magazine, and The North American Review.

At a time in the 1890s when Clemens endured great financial distress, two magazines came to the rescue. Cosmopolitan magazine’s editor George Brisben Walker paid him $5,000 for twelve stories, and Harper’s Magazine serialized Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc and Tom Sawyer, Detective before they were published as books. In 1903, Harper and Brothers went on to make Mark Twain the best paid writer in the United States. Its president, George Harvey, gave him a contract that paid 30 cents a word “for everything he wrote, whether it was printed or thrown away.” As a result, dozens of his pieces appeared in both Harper’s Magazine and Harper’s Weekly.

Mark Twain. Forty-Three Days in an Open Boat.” Harper’s Monthly Magazine. New York, December 1866.
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This story was Mark Twain’s first appearance in print in a national magazine. Published as his “jumping frog” story was appearing in newspapers throughout America, his hope of giving his pen name national exposure was thwarted when the story was accidentally attributed to “Mark Swain” in the magazine’s index. Decades later he would write of this experience in “My Debut as a Literary Person.”

From the collection of Susan Jaffe Tane

Mark Twain. “Old Times on the Mississippi.” The Atlantic Monthly. Boston, January-June, August 1875.
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Appearing first as a seven-part story in The Atlantic Monthly, “Old Times on the Mississippi” was later published as part of Mark Twain’s book, Life on the Mississippi. When William Dean Howells read the manuscript of the first installment, he wrote an encouraging letter to Clemens saying, “The piece about the Mississippi is capital—it almost made the water in our ice-pitcher muddy as I read it.”

From the collection of Susan Jaffe Tane

Mark Twain. “An Autobiography.” The Aldine, Volume 4 (1872). New York: James Sutton & Company.
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The Aldine was a beautifully illustrated publication that contained typographical reproductions of woodcuts, tinted engravings, and additional illustrations within the text. It featured articles on fine art, gardening, travel, poetry, and some short fiction. Volume 4 contains a very brief autobiography by Mark Twain and an engraving of him.

From the collection of Susan Jaffe Tane

Mark Twain. “Christian Science and the Book of Mrs. Eddy.” The Cosmopolitan, New York, October 1899.
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This article was the first of Mark Twain’s attacks on Christian Science, which culminated in his book Christian Science in 1907. Though he was not critical of the Christian Science belief in replacing medicines and surgery with exercise and massage, he did object to its becoming a religion.

From the collection of Susan Jaffe Tane

Sydney Brooks. “England’s Ovation to Mark Twain.” Harper’s Weekly. New York, July 27, 1907.
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Clemens signed a lucrative contract with Harper & Brothers in 1903 that made the firm Mark Twain’s exclusive American publisher. Over the next several years he contributed a number of pieces to Harper’s Weekly, the literary paper issued by his publisher. Here the magazine reports on Clemens’s trip to England to receive an honorary degree from Oxford University.

From the collection of Susan Jaffe Tane

Mark Twain. “Pudd’nhead Wilson.” The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine. New York, December 1893.
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Pudd’nhead Wilson was first serialized in Century Magazine in seven installments beginning in December 1893. The book would be published to mixed reviews a year later.

From the collection of Susan Jaffe Tane

Twain, Mark. Pudd’nhead Wilson and the Comedy, Those Extraordinary Twins. New York: American Publishing Company, 1894. First edition.
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From the collection of Susan Jaffe Tane

Mark Twain. “The Mysterious Stranger.” Harper’s Magazine. New York, May-November 1916.
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The first printing of Mark Twain’s posthumously published final novel, The Mysterious Stranger appeared as a serial in Harper’s and was edited by Twain’s literary executor, Albert Bigelow Paine. Although Twain worked on this story for several years, and produced several versions of the story, he was unable to see it to print before his death in 1910.

From the collection of Susan Jaffe Tane

“Unpublished Chapters from the Autobiography of Mark Twain: Part I.” Harper’s Magazine. New York, February 1922.
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Two years before Albert Bigalow Paine’s two-volume Mark Twain’s Autobiography was published, Harper’s released material that had not been included in The North American Review series in 1906.

From the collection of Susan Jaffe Tane

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