"Don't scold me, Livy—let me pay my due homage to your worth; let me honor you above all women; let me love you with a love that knows no doubt, no question—for you are my world, my life, my pride, my all of earth that is worth the having." These are the words of Samuel Clemens in love. Playful and reverential, jubilant and despondent, they are filled with tributes to his fiancée Olivia Langdon and with promises faithfully kept during a thirty-four-year marriage.

The 188 superbly edited letters gathered here show Samuel Clemens having few idle moments in 1869. When he was not relentlessly "banged about from town to town" on the lecture circuit or busily revising The Innocents Abroad, the book that would make his reputation, he was writing impassioned letters to Olivia. These letters, the longest he ever wrote, make up the bulk of his correspondence for the year and are filled with his acute wit and dazzling language. This latest volume of Mark Twain's Letters captures Clemens on the verge of becoming the celebrity and family man he craved to be.

This volume has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and by a major donation to the Friends of The Bancroft Library from the Pareto Fund.

Victor Fischer and Michael B. Frank are editors and Dahlia Armon is a former editor with the Mark Twain Project at The Bancroft Library.

"No writer has come closer to embodying, in his own history, the contemporary history of his nation. . . . It is from the letters in this copious and munificent edition . . . that one gets the full sprawl and multitudinousness of the man and his extraordinary knack of speaking for America."—Times Literary Supplement

"Distinguished by meticulous editorial standards and exacting scholarship. The letters of few other authors have been handled with such exhaustive and intelligent care."—Choice

"As scrupulously edited as the first two volumes of this definitive edition. . . A delightful, invaluable, energy-charged addition to Twain scholarship."—Charles C. Nash, Library Journal

"highly entertaining and comprehensive"—Jackie Jones, San Francisco Chronicle

"I can think of no recent book on Mark Twain that has not benefitted variously and directly from the work of the Mark Twain Project. It continues to serve the global community of readers with reliable editions of Mark Twain's writings, and its resources, both on the Berkeley campus and through its scholarly publications, are readily and easily made available to all who inquire. . . .

"As this edition of letters continues and one becomes familiar with its editorial ways, both in the presentation and annotation of the letter texts, one's admiration only increases. So far as an educated eye can judge, there is simply nothing missing from this edition, and one turns to these letter volumes with a confidence in their editorial authority that is unfortunately rare."—Thomas Wortham, Nineteenth-Century Literature

"The description of how the letters were gathered from various collections is sometimes more thrilling than the text, reading like a successful detective story."—William Baker, Antioch Review

"anybody who absorbs this rich volume will surely understand Twain better and may dare to think that reconstructing the past is feasible if built on enough documentary fact. . . . More generally, his courtship letters glow with such idealizing that the hypnotized reader, forgetting well-known facts, starts feeling a reasonable suspense: Can the notoriously mercurial as well as irreverent Twain personality hold this intensity through a long engagement? Will he mess up eventually, as he often did and claimed invariably to do?"—Louis J. Budd, Mississippi Quarterly

"splendid"—Brian Harding, Journal of American Studies

"The Mark Twain Project editors handle the dramatic exigencies of 1869 with their accustomed deftness and transparency. Their 'plain text' transcriptions offer a reader the feeling of an immediate encounter with Clemens's letters, and the accompanying annotative and supplementary materials—facsimiles, photographs, genealogical charts—provide a wealth of information and texture."—Jeffrey Steinbrink, American Literature

Mark Twain Project Online