About the Book
This collection of correspondence between Clemens and Rogers may be thought of as a continuation of Mark Twain's Letters to His Publishers 1867-1894 edited by Hamlin Hill. It completes the story begun there of Samuel Clemens's business affairs especially insofar as they concern dealings with publishers; and it documents Clemens's progress from financial disaster with the Paige typesetter and Webster & Company to renewed prosperity under the steady skillful hand of H. H. Rogers. But Clemens’s correspondence with Rogers reveals more than a business relationship. It illuminates a friendship which Clemens came to value above all others and it suggests a profound change in his patterns of living. He who during the Hartford years had been a devoted family man content with a discrete circle of intimates now became again (as he had been during the Nevada and California years) a man among sporting men enjoying prizefights and professional billiard matches in public and—in private—long days of poker gruff jest and good Scotch whisky aboard Rogers’s magnificent yacht.