“She was a magazine of feelings, & they were of all kinds & of all shades of force,” he wrote of Olivia “Susy” Clemens shortly after her death in 1896.
“In all things she was intense: in her this characteristic was not a mere glow, dispensing warmth, but a consuming fire,” he said of the daughter who was the inspiration for his “Joan of Arc” and “A Horse's Tale.” The 64-page, handwritten document is among a trove of 200 personal letters, manuscripts and photographs of Mark Twain — the pen name for Samuel Langhorne Clemens — going on sale June 17 at Sotheby's New York.
The auction house will exhibit the material for five days, beginning Wednesday, on the 100th anniversary of the author's death at age 74. The Associated Press got a preview earlier this week.
“‘A Family Sketch’ is certainly one of the gems of the Sotheby's sale,” said Robert Hirst, general editor of the Mark Twain Papers & Projects at the University of California at Berkeley, which has the largest repository of Twain material. “Any Mark Twain archive or collector would be willing to go hungry for two or three years just in order to be able to buy it.”
