Foreword

Foreword This issue begins the tenth year of The Missouri Review. In that fairly brief lifetime, it has published five thousand and some pages of work, much of it by American authors who either were previously unpublished or just beginning to achieve recognition. Entering our second decade, we reaffirm our commitment to those "unfamous" writers. They are our main business. We will continue to be one of their proving grounds, a place where their work can stand side by side with better known writers from all over the country. To celebrate our birthday, however, we are putting an added emphasis in this issue on writing by or about Missourians. The centerpiece—and the first in our Found Texts series—is a late story by Mark Twain which essay editor Robert Sattelmeyer recently ran across while studying Twain's pilot years. The story was previously known about by Twain bibliographers, but it has never been published. On the first page of the manuscript, Albert Bigelow Paine, Twain's original literary executor, wrote "Feud Story" and "unfinished and not usable." Paine was the self-appointed protagonist of Twain's image as a bland, cracker-barrel philosopher, and Sattelmeyer feels this may have influenced his decision to avoid publishing a story which displays not just the prevailing pessimism of the author's later years but also a subject matter that at the time was considered risque. In his fine biography Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain, Justin Kaplan describes how Twain arrived at the crisis of his later years. Kaplan portrays Twain as a man who thought of himself as an entrepreneur, a citizen of his own Gilded Age, who above all hungered to make a great fortune. As a journalist, circuit-travelling humorist, husband to the heiress of a modest fortune, and owner of the publishing house that put out some of his own most popular books, Twain did by any reasonable measure achieve comfortable wealth, but ever-expanding financial goals carried him, starting in the early 1880s, into a series of entanglements and reversals that ended in personal bankruptcy . Twain's notebooks, recently published in the ongoing University of California Twain series, validate Kaplan's portrait. In their first-hand descriptions of Twain's daily concerns, the notebooks show a man enmeshed in a bewildering complexity of business and investment schemes. The author was no fool as an entrepreneur, but he involved himself in his publishing business in an unproductive way, as a floating, distant, hopelessly demanding owner, whose ambition for profit was never satisfied. As a publisher, he outdid his crassest competitors in commercialism and greed, eventually driving his editor to despair and resignation and the house to ruin. His greatest loss, however, resulted from long involvement as a backer of the Paige typesetter, a project for which he reserved a bottomless well of optimism and, by all evidence, gullibility. Twain had a natural interest in automatic typesetters, since as a boy back in Hannibal he had been a printer's devil, setting type the old way, by hand. His notebooks demonstrate a fifteen-year obsession with the Paige machine, as he wrote publicity for it, frequent notes to himself and others regarding its infinite promise, rationalizations about its repeated failures, drafts of letters to other possible backers, and canards against the much simpler Mergenthaler typesetter, which turned out to be more servicable than the ten-thousand-moving-part Paige. In 1895 he finally abandoned the fatally complex machine, after allowing it to soak up almost two hundred thousand of his dollars and a lot of his time. Everything came down on Twain in the nineties—the tragic death of his daughter, bankruptcy of his publishing company, the final end of the Paige project, and in 1895, personal bankruptcy. The success of much of his writing during this period hinges on how well he mastered his dark and questioning mood. Some of the late work indeed does fall prey to shallow cynicism, but stories like "The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg" and The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson are among his most thematically powerful works. The story published here is from sometime between 1900 and 1903. A number of its themes and...