Unsigned handwritten manuscript pages by Samuel Clemens and Charles Dudley Warner, each one page, 5 x 8, no date but circa 1873. Pages from the manuscript for The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, a collaborative novel written by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner. Marked as page "103" at the top, Clemens writes, in full: "was fruitless. But all day he & his wife made inquiries, & hoped against hope. All that they could learn was that the child and her parents came on board at New Orleans, where they had just arrived in a vessel from Cuba; that they looked like people from the Atlantic States; that the family name was Van Brunt & the child's name Laura. This was all. The parents had not been seen since the explosion. The child's manners were those of a little lady, and her clothes were daintier & finer than any Mrs. Hawkins had ever."
On page "1163," Warner writes, in full: "as the chances were that he would be, he and Col. Sellers never would have gone into the Columbus Navigation scheme, and probably never into the East Tennessee Land scheme, and he would not now be detained in New York from very important business operations on the Pacific coast, for the sole purpose of giving evidence to convict of murder the only woman he ever loved half as much as he loves himself. If Mr. Bolton had said the little word 'no' to Mr. Bigler, Alice Montague might now be spending the winter in Philadelphia, and Philip also (waiting to resume his mining operations in the spring); and Ruth would not be an assistant in a Philadelphia hospital, taxing her strength with arduous routine duties, day by day, in order to lighten a little the burdens that."
Both pages have a few handwritten corrections, which were retained in the work as published. Affixed to slightly larger cardstock mounts and in overall fine condition, with some light edge soiling, and slight fading to Warner's writing.
These pages represent passages from Chapter 5 (Clemens) and Chapter 50 (Warner) of the book, which offers a satirical look at greed and political corruption in post-Civil War America. Though not one of Mark Twain's most popular works, its title—The Gilded Age—has come to represent that era in common parlance. According to Twain's biographer, Albert Bigelow Paine, the genesis of the book came from a dinner-party challenge issued by their wives: furnish the American people with better novels than the ones they're reading. They completed the entire novel between February and April 1873, with Twain writing the first eleven chapters, Warner writing the next twelve, and the remainder evenly split between the two.
This item is Pre-Certified by PSA/DNA
Buy a third-party letter of authenticity for
$100.00
*This item has been pre-certified by a trusted third-party authentication service, and by placing a bid on this item, you agree to accept the opinion of this authentication service. If you wish to have an opinion rendered by a different authenticator of your choosing, you must do so prior to your placing of any bid. RR Auction is not responsible for differing opinions submitted 30 days after the date of the sale.
