Additions to the Mark Twain Library

Alan Gribben's Mark Twain's Library: A Reconstruction re-contours a cultural world that contributes to our understanding of Mark Twain's intellectual life. Gribben cites a 1908 edition of Owen Wister's Lin McLean,¹ but Twain also owned and read two other books by Wister, The New Swiss Family Robinson (1882) and The Dragon of Wantley (1892).

Before Wister began to write western American fiction, he wrote a series of burlesque sketches called "The New Swiss Family Robinson" for the Harvard Lampoon in 1882. He parodied the original Swiss Family Robinson, of which every page contains the "condensed milk" of a moral to Swiss children; Wister, however, makes it disclose "much of the undergraduate life of the time" at Harvard.² Published in a volume by S. W. Sever and Company of Cambridge, the novel brought "a letter of praise" from Mark Twain.³ This was not the only time that Wister received a compliment from Twain.

Wister's second book, The Dragon of Wantley, was published a decade later by J. B. Lippincott of Philadelphia. Two reviewers favorably compared it to Twain's A Connecticut Yankee (1889): the New York Critic called it "a better joke on the Middle Ages than Mark Twain's,"⁴ and the Boston Literary World declared that it "reminds one in some degree of Mark Twain's parody of the legend of King Arthur" but "in much better taste."⁵ Twain read the book and, as Wister noted in the preface to his 1928 edition of Lin McLean, it "brought, as from the sky, a letter from Mark Twain."⁶ The letter is reprinted below:⁷

Helena, Montana, Aug. 4, 1895

My Dear Mr. Wister:

I have taken the Dragon of Wantley away from my wife & daughter—by violence—& am reading it with a delicate & tingling enjoyment which goes searching & soothing & tickling & caressing all through me everywhere like balm of Gilead with a whet of apollinaries in it. I owe you thanks, and thanks, & still thanks and more thanks, for writing it.

Sincerely Yours
S L Clemens
Good-bye; I shall be on the Pacific Ocean when this reaches you.

Written from Montana when Twain was en route to the west coast on his speaking tour around the world, the letter proves that he remained interested in Wister's writing.