Letters Lighten Twain’s Dark Image

In letters rediscovered in an attic, Mark Twain displays his trademark pithy humor and an amiable exuberance that some biographers believed had deserted him near the end of his life.

The correspondence contradicts the typical portrayal of the celebrated author as being a bitter, cynical and disillusioned old man in the years before his death in April 1910, a Twain scholar says.

Only a month earlier, in a letter from Bermuda to a close family friend, Maude Littleton, Twain describes a secluded, easygoing vacation interspersed with sailing, a daily drive and band concerts.

“Time drifts along here at about the gait I like,” he wrote. “There are no excitements and I don’t want any. . . . I think I could live here always and be contented.”

Twain also jokes about a photograph that Littleton had sent him, chiding her for her hat. “I won’t go so far as to say it is the damndest hat I ever saw, I will say it is the derndest,” he wrote.

He ends with the words, “You go to heaven if you want to--I’d rather stay here.”

Four letters dated between 1908 and 1910, a photograph of Twain and a “Happy New Year” greeting he sent to Littleton and her husband, Martin, a noted orator, were given to Elmira College this summer.

They were found some years earlier in the attic at the Littletons’ home in Plandome on Long Island by Richard Brown and his wife, Elmira College graduate Barbara Ericson Brown. Brown’s parents had bought the Littleton estate.

“These letters were written by an engaging and vital Mark Twain, not by the grim, cynical old man so often portrayed by some of his biographers,” said Gretchen Sharlow, director of the college’s Center for Mark Twain Studies.

“They will make a valuable contribution to the work of scholars who are reevaluating the last years of Twain’s life.”

In a December 1908 letter, Twain thanks the Littletons for their gift of tobacco and whiskey. “I had just reformed, but it is not too late to rearrange that,” he wrote.

Twain is buried in Elmira, a western New York town where his family summered for more than 20 years.

Twain, whose real name was Samuel Clemens, wrote some of his best novels at his Elmira home, including “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” and “The Prince and the Pauper.”