Extract From Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven.

TWAIN, Mark [Samuel L. Clemens].

$750.00

Item Number: 129139

New York: Harper & Brothers, 1909.

First edition of the last work published by Twain during his lifetime with C-F on the copyright page. Octavo, original half cloth over pictorial boards, paper spine label, frontispiece in blue and white. In very good 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.