Extract From Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven.

TWAIN, Mark [Samuel L. Clemens].

$475.00

Item Number: 127530

New York: Harper & Brothers, n.d..

Early printing of the last work published by Twain during his lifetime. Octavo, original cloth with titles in white and vignette in black, frontispiece in blue and white, no publication date to the title page. From the library American journalist William Safire with his bookplate to the pastedown. William Safire was an important American author, columnist, journalist, and presidential speechwriter. He joined Nixon’s campaign for the 1960 Presidential race, and again in 1968. After Nixon’s 1968 victory, Safire served as a speechwriter for him and Spiro Agnew. He authored several political columns in addition to his weekly column “On Language” in The New York Times Magazine from 1979 until the month of his death and authored two books on grammar and linguistics: The New Language of Politics (1968) and what Zimmer called Safire’s “magnum opus,” Safire’s Political Dictionary. Safire later served as a member of the Pulitzer Prize Board from 1995 to 2004 and in 2006 was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President George W. Bush. In near fine condition.

Although not published until 1907 in Harper's Magazine, followed by a slim book version with some revisions in 1909, the story was quite old. The original manuscript dated back perhaps as far as 1868, and an 1873 version has survived. The story was revised several times, and chapters 3 and 4 of the manuscript became the Harper's story. Longer versions of the manuscript have subsequently been published, including one edited by Dixon Wector which appeared as part of Report from Paradise (1952), and in part 1 of Mark Twain's Quarrel with Heaven: "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven" And Other Sketches" (Ray B. Browne, ed., 1970). Twain claimed that the story in its early version was a satire of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward's The Gates Ajar, a very popular novel published in 1868.