The Autobiography of Mark Twain Mark Twain (best beach reads .TXT) 📖

“waived their rights” in certain letters which I wrote for that journal while absent on the Quaker City trip. I was young then, I am white-headed now, but the insult of that word rankles yet, now that I am reading that paragraph for the first time in many years, reading that paragraph for the first time since it was written, perhaps. There were rights, it is true⁠—such rights as the strong are able to acquire over the weak and the absent. Early in ’66 George Barnes invited me to resign my reportership on his paper, the San Francisco Morning Call, and for some months thereafter I was without money or work; then I had a pleasant turn of fortune. The proprietors of the Sacramento Union, a great and influential daily journal, sent me to the Sandwich Islands to write four letters a month at twenty dollars apiece. I was there four or five months, and returned to find myself about the best known man on the Pacific coast. Thomas McGuire, proprietor of several theaters, said that now was the time to make my fortune⁠—strike while the iron was hot⁠—break into the lecture field! I did it. I announced a lecture on the Sandwich Islands, closing the advertisement with the remark: “Admission one dollar; doors open at half past seven, the trouble begins at eight.” A true prophecy. The trouble certainly did begin at eight, when I found myself in front of the only audience I had ever faced, for the fright which pervaded me from head to foot was paralyzing. It lasted two minutes and was as bitter as death; the memory of it is indestructible, but it had its compensations, for it made me immune from timidity before audiences for all time to come. I lectured in all the principal Californian towns and in Nevada, then lectured once or twice more in San Francisco, then retired from the field rich⁠—for me⁠—and laid out a plan to sail westward from San Francisco and go around the world. The proprietors of the Alta engaged me to write an account of the trip for that paper⁠—fifty letters of a column and a half each, which would be about 2,000 words per letter, and the pay to be twenty dollars per letter.

I went east to St. Louis to say goodbye to my mother, and then I was bitten by the prospectus of Captain Duncan of the Quaker City excursion, and I ended by joining it. During the trip I wrote and sent the fifty letters; six of them miscarried and I wrote six new ones to complete my contract. Then I put together a lecture on the trip and delivered it in San Francisco at great and satisfactory pecuniary profit; then I branched out into the country and was aghast at the result: I had been entirely forgotten, I never had people enough in my houses to sit as a jury of inquest on my lost reputation! I inquired into this curious condition of things and found that the thrifty owners of that prodigiously rich Alta newspaper had copyrighted all those poor little twenty-dollar letters and had threatened with prosecution any journal which should venture to copy a paragraph from them.

And there I was! I had contracted to furnish a large book, concerning the excursion, to the American Publishing Co. of Hartford, and I supposed I should need all those letters to fill it out with. I was in an uncomfortable situation⁠—that is, if the proprietors of this stealthily acquired copyright should refuse to let me use the letters. That is what they did; Mr. Mac⁠—something⁠—I have forgotten the rest of his name17⁠—said his firm were going to make a book out of the letters in order to get back the thousand dollars which they had paid for them. I said that if they had acted fairly and honorably, and had allowed the country press to use the letters or portions of them, my lecture skirmish on the coast would have paid me ten thousand dollars, whereas the Alta had lost me that amount. Then he offered a compromise: he would publish the book and allow me 10-percent royalty on it. The compromise did not appeal to me, and I said so. The book sale would be confined to San Francisco, and my royalty would not pay me enough to board me three months, whereas my Eastern contract, if carried out, could be profitable to me, for I had a sort of reputation on the Atlantic seaboard, acquired through the publication of six excursion letters in the New York Tribune and one or two in the Herald.

In the end Mr. Mac agreed to suppress his book, on certain conditions: in my preface I must thank the Alta for waiving its “rights” and granting me permission. I objected to the thanks. I could not with any large degree of sincerity thank the Alta for bankrupting my lecture raid. After considerable debate my point was conceded and the thanks left out.

Noah Brooks was editor of the Alta at the time, a man of sterling character and equipped with a right heart, also a good historian where facts were not essential. In biographical sketches of me written many years afterward (1902) he was quite eloquent in praises of the generosity of the Alta people in giving to me without compensation a book which, as history had afterward shown, was worth a fortune. After all the fuss, I did not levy heavily upon the Alta letters. I found that they were newspaper matter, not book matter. They had been written here and there and yonder, as opportunity had given me a chance working moment or two during our feverish flight around about Europe or in the furnace heat of my stateroom on board the Quaker City, therefore they were loosely constructed and needed to have some of the wind and water squeezed out