Mark Twain’s Letters, Volume Three: 1869 ed. by Victor Fischer, Michael B. Frank, and: Overland with Mark Twain: James B. Pond’s Photographs and Journal of the North American Lecture Tour of 1895 ed. by Alan Gribben, Nick Karanovich (review)

174 Western American Literature This book challenges film makers to capture the illusive spirit of London’s fiction on film for the enjoyment of today’s audiences. It also invites further investigation of the social and historical forces shaping the relationship be­ tween fiction and film in twentieth-century America.¿USAN M. NUERNBERG University ofWisconsin-Oshkosh /Mark Twain’ s Letters, Volume Three: 1869. Edited by Victor Fischer and Michael B. Frank; associate editor, Dahlia B. Armon. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. 776 pages, $40.00.) jrfverland with Mark Twain: James B. Pond’ s Photographs and Journal of the North American Lecture Tour of 1895. Edited by Alan Gribben and Nick Karanovich. (Elmira, New York: Center for Mark Twain Studies, 1992. 112 pages, $29.00.) Twain devotees will recall that 1869 saw the humorist counting the days until his wedding; struggling through two successful, but exhausting, lecture tours; wrangling with Elisha Bliss over delays in the publication of Innocents Abroad', reveling in the book’s success when it finally appeared; and taking charge of the Buffalo Express. The third volume of Mark Twain’ s Letters contains the surviving epistolary record of this frantic period, one hundred eighty-eight letters addressed to his fiancée (Olivia Langdon), various friends, relatives, and business associates. The extra-romantic correspondence, however, isjust a side dish here: Twain’s letters to his “little rascal,” Livy, compose nearly half of the total number of items and are the longest in the collection. All of the now famous peculiarities of the courtship are vividly evident, especially Twain’s playing the regenerate Christian to Livy’s gentle shepherdess. Though Volume Threeoffers little in the way of significant new detail—Twain scholars have been acquainted with most of this material for years—it allows a much wider audience to glimpse the humorist’s psyche refracted by that dy­ namic system of relationships which the collected letters project. Where one can view Twain from the perspective of, say, both his penitential letters to Mary “M other” Fairbanks and his defensive correspondence with his biological mother, one can begin to discern a three-dimensional character. The effort expended in editing the Letters (projected to run to twenty volumes) remains Herculean. In addition to the long annotations outlining the context of each missive, Volume Three offers calendars of courtship letters and lectures; facsimiles of manuscripts, reviews, and promotional materials (for lectures and Innocents Abroad); photographs of family, friends, and the most famous of Twain’s professional correspondents; and genealogical charts of the Clemens and Langdon families. In 1895, at the age of sixty, the bankrupt Twain reluctantly returned to the Reviews 175 lecture platform to “unload [his debts] on the whole English-speaking world.” The first leg of the famous tour ran wesf from Twain’s retreat in upstate New York, across the northern United States to Vancouver, British Columbia, where the Clemenses boarded a steamer for Australia (Twain followed the equator with his wife and their daughter Clara). The tour’s organizer, lecture-impresario Major James Pond, accompanied the Clemens family during this segment of the journey, taking photos and keeping a journal. For years, Twain scholars believed the only relics of his record were eighteen photographs and the account of the tour which appeared in Eccentricities of Genius (1900), the Major’s professional memoirs. In 1984, however, Twainiana collector Nick Karanovich unearthed a second, manuscript account of the North American tour (approximately twenty pages of which do not appear in Eccentricities of Genius) and one hundred twenty-five photographic negatives from Pond’s camera. Overland with Mark Twain presents all of this new material with an introduc­ tion by Professor Alan Gribben, best known for his work on the humorist’s library. While the manuscript contains some rich new material (including part of a speech Twain made at the opening of the play “Pudd’nhead Wilson” and a weird story he told reporters concerning a cigar case made of the skin of a young woman), the interest of the book lies mainly in the photos. A handful of them entirelyjustify the book: Livy shining with good nature; Twain posing with a family of Norwegian immigrants, looking like he had inadvertently...