CLEMENS, Samuel (1835-1910). Autograph letter signed ("SLC") to Margery H. Clinton, Redding, 30 October 1908.

One page, 168 x 124mm.

"Good, you're coming!," he exclaims in a wonderfully effusive letter that takes off on a tangent conflating various biblical tales: "Well I am glad. Even dern glad, as Pontius Pilate used to say. I think it was Pontius; at any rate it was the one that wrote Paradise Lost & was eventually burned by the Church for falling down the mountain & breaking the tables of stone. I never cared for him, although an ancestor. he ought to have known he was in no condition to carry things down a mountain & everybody looking at him."

Clinton, the daughter of the noted New York City architect Charles W. Clinton, first met Clemens in 1907 through Mary Rogers, a mutual friend. Clinton would occasionally visit Clemens at this home in Redding Connecticut, and the pair remained correspondents until Clemens' death in 1910. (Margery Clinton Papers, Finding Aid, Vassar College. https://digitallibrary.vassar.edu/collections/finding-aids/22f49f6b-4b5c-4e34-ad40-0ea865f111c5)