Born in Saratoga, N.Y., John Hyatt Smith was educated by his schoolmaster father, then sent to Detroit to work as a clerk. There he was a close friend of Anson Burlingame, who later befriended Clemens in Hawaii. Smith studied for the ministry when he wasn't clerking. After ordination in 1848 he served as a Baptist minister in Poughkeepsie, Cleveland, Buffalo, and Philadelphia before he accepted a position at the Lee Avenue Church in Brooklyn. Smith ran as an independent Republican for a seat in the US House of Representatives and served from 1881 to 1883. In December 1883 he was called by a congregational council presided over by Edward Beecher (brother of Henry Ward Beecher) to fill a temporary pastorship at the East Congregational Church in Brooklyn, where he remained until his death.

Bloodgood Cutter was a farmer and poet from Long Island. At the outset of the Quaker City voyage, Clemens described Cutter in his notebook as “fifty years old, & small of his age. He dresses in homespun, & is a simple minded, honest, old-fashioned farmer, with a strange proclivity for writing rhymes. He writes them on all possible subjects, & gets them printed on slips of paper, with his portrait at the head. These he will give to any man that comes along, whether he has anything against him or not” (N&J1, p. 344). Cutter considered himself the poet laureate of the excursion, leading Clemens to call him the “Poet Lariat” in Innocents Abroad, adopting Francis Eugene Andrews’s mispronunciation. In 1880 he called him a “mildewed idiot. His friends call him a lunatic—but that is pretty fulsome flattery; one cannot become a lunatic without first having brains” (30 April 1880 to Perkins, on MTPO); 31 March and 1 April 1869 to Fairbanks, L2, p. 185). In 1886 Cutter self-published a collection of his poems entitled The Long Island Farmer's Poems. His poems were never celebrated, yet he was a successful farmer: at his death his estate was worth $900,000.

George Washington Cable, a writer from New Orleans who fought for the Confederacy, was best known for his realist novels about Creole life, such as The Grandissimes: A Story of Creole Life (1880) and Dr. Sevier (1882). Having heard about Cable's work from William Dean Howells, Clemens met him in New Orleans in 1882, an encounter he described in chapters 44 and 47 of Life on the Mississippi. The winter following his April Fool joke he and Clemens went on their tour throughout the United States in which they alternated reading from their works. While the tour was a success, Clemens elaborated in a letter to Howells about his and Cable's "curious experience" together: "You will never never know, never divine, guess, imagine, how loathsome a thing the Christian religion can be made until you come to know & study Cable daily & hourly. Mind you, I like him; he is pleasant company; I rage & swear at him sometimes, but we do not quarrel; we get along mighty happily together; but in him & his person I have learned to hate all religions. He has taught me to abhor & detest the Sabbath-day & hunt up new & troublesome ways to dishonor it" (27 February 1885 to William Dean Howells, MS in the Berg Collection, New York Public Library). Clemens may have been responsible for the rumors about Cable's stinginess during his stay with the Clemenses in the winter of 1884 that appeared in the Boston Herald on 7 May 1885; Clemens denied knowing anything about the "professional newspaper liar" when Cable asked him to refute the damaging story, and encouraged him to let it go. Cable did succeed in getting a retraction, but Clemens's relationship with Cable soured afterward (N&J3, p. 154).

George Parsons Lathrop was an editor, poet, critic, and copyright reformer. He served as associate editor of the Atlantic Monthly (1875–77), editor-in-chief of the Boston Courier (1877–79), and literary editor of the New York Star in the late 1880s. He became secretary of the American Copyright League in 1883. Lathrop married Rose Hawthorne, the daughter of Nathaniel Hawthorne, in 1871. From 1879 to 1883 the couple lived in Concord, Mass., in the Hawthorne homestead, the Wayside. Lathrop wrote A Study of Hawthorne (1876) and was an editor of the Riverside Edition of The Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (1882–84). Lathrop was a founding member of the Authors Club and a member of the Players Club and the Papyrus Club in Boston.

Dr. John S. Billings served as medical inspector of the Army of the Potomac. After the Civil War he was posted to the office of the US surgeon general as a lieutenant colonel, where he established the National Library of Medicine within the War Department's Surgeon General's Library, for which he served as librarian until his retirement from active army service in 1895. In 1896 he became the first chief librarian of the New York Public Library. He was also a founding member of the Cosmos Club in Washington, D.C. He probably knew Clemens from their mutual friend Colonel George Waring, with whom Billings worked on several sanitation projects.

Daniel Chester French was a prolific sculptor best known for his Minuteman at Concord (1874) and for the statue of Abraham Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. (1920). Louisa May Alcott's sister Mary convinced him to be a sculptor when he was growing up in Concord, Mass. He was also a member of the Boston Authors Club, which included Clemens, William Dean Howells, and Thomas Bailey Aldrich as members.

Francis Davis Millet was a journalist and artist. After serving as a drummer boy and surgical aide to his father in the Civil War he worked as a reporter for the Boston Courier and correspondent for the Boston Advertiser (1869–70). In 1871 he studied painting at the Royal Academy of Fine Art in Antwerp, and then in Italy, moving between art studios in Rome and Venice. Upon his return to the United States in 1876 he worked as chief assistant to John La Farge in the creation of murals for Trinity Church, Boston. He completed a portrait of Clemens in January 1877. From 1877 to 1888 he was a correspondent for the New York Herald covering the Russo-Turkish War. He died on the Titanic in 1912.

Son of businessman Henry W. Sage, Dean Sage graduated from Albany Law School in 1861 but chose to work in his father's lumber business in Albany. His father was a close friend of the Beecher family and a longtime member and trustee of the Plymouth Church in Brooklyn. Sage had moved back to Brooklyn from Albany by the time he wrote this April Fool letter to Clemens. He was an avid sportsman who enjoyed writing and collecting books on angling. He died at a fishing camp in Canada in 1902.

Daughter of Col. George E. Waring Jr., Effie Blunt Waring was born on Horace Greeley's farm. She studied painting with Abbott Thayer in Boston, and lived and painted in the family homestead, the Hypotenuse, in Newport, R.I. In 1904 she founded Aquidneck Cottage Industries, a charitable organization that taught local working-class women domestic skills and crafts, e.g. needlework and embroidery (Newport Mercury, 20 October 1933, 3).

George E. Waring Jr. was an author, agriculturalist, and sanitary engineer, and a close friend of Cable, Clemens, and James R. Osgood. In 1855 he managed Horace Greeley's farm at Chappaqua, N.Y. After the Civil War, where he commanded the Fourth Missouri Cavalry, he retired his commission to manage Ogden Farm, a model farm in Newport, R.I. Waring wrote both husbandry manuals and bucolic novels, several of which were published by Osgood. In the late 1870s, Waring designed toilets, and from there moved on to design entire sewer systems to alleviate the cholera epidemic at Memphis. In 1895 he established the first organized street-cleaning department in New York City. In 1898 William McKinley sent Waring to Cuba to survey sanitary issues, but he contracted yellow fever and died at home in October 1898.

Mary Elizabeth "Lilian" (née Woodman) married the writer and editor Thomas Bailey Aldrich in 1865. In 1920 she published a memoir of her late husband entitled Crowding Memories. (See also Gary Scharnhorst's Twain in His Own Time [University of Iowa Press, 2010], 95–98.) Clemens did not have a high opinion of her. For example, in a 27 December 1893 letter to his daughter Susy he fumed about Lilian: "Lord, I loathe that woman so! She is an idiot—an absolute idiot—& does not know it. She is sham, sham, sham—not a genuine fibre in her anywhere—a manifest & transparent humbug—& her husband, the sincerest man that walks, doesn’t seem aware of it. It is a most extraordinary combination: he, fine in heart, fine in mind, fine in every conceivable way, sincere, genuine, & lovable beyond all men save only Joe Jefferson—& tied for life to this vacant hellion, this clothes-rack, this twaddling, blethering, driveling blatherskite!" (MS facsimile in CU-MARK).

Thomas Bailey Aldrich was best known for his poems and stories about New Hampshire, where he was born and raised, including his novel The Story of a Bad Boy, which was a forerunner for Tom Sawyer. He met Clemens in 1871. He served on the editorial staff of the Evening Mirror, Home Journal, and Saturday Press. From 1861 to 1862 he served as Civil War correspondent for the New York Tribune. In 1865 he married Lilian Woodman and moved to Boston, where James R. Osgood had offered him the editorship of Every Saturday, a post he held until 1874. He succeeded William Dean Howells as editor of the Atlantic Monthly in 1881, a position he retained until 1890. While Clemens was not initially enthusiastic about Aldrich's work, he often provided advice (see his letters of 15, 16, 24, 25 March 1874 suggesting changes in his novel Prudence Palfrey, L6, 74–82, 89–95). They remained lifelong friends. In his 1904 sketch “Robert Louis Stevenson and Thomas Bailey Aldrich,” Clemens wrote that Aldrich “never had his peer for prompt and pithy and witty and humorous sayings” ( AutoMT1, 229 , 539 n. 229.8).

William S. Andrews was an actor and noted public speaker who often used Mark Twain's works to demonstrate "dialect humor." Later in life he was an influential politician (see L5, p. 209 n. 1).

Charles Beach, a real estate investor, was the son of Moses Beach and older brother of Emma Beach.

Moses S. Beach was a printer and best known as the editor of the New York Sun. He was a longtime member and former trustee of Plymouth Church who, with his daughter Emeline (1850–1924), was among the “most prominent Brooklynites” to meet Clemens on the Quaker City excursion in 1867. Clemens spoke well of Beach, grateful for the treatment he had received from him and especially praising his liberality and generosity toward the crew of the Quaker City.

Henry Ward Beecher was the renowned liberal pastor of Plymouth Church in Brooklyn, and the author of several popular books. He was also a social activist who promoted abolition, temperance, and women's rights. Clemens met him in the winter of 1868, and admired his congeniality even when pointing out his flimsy convictions (which would culminate in the Beecher-Tilton adultery trial of 1875). Clemens also published the sketch "Rev. Henry Ward Beecher's Farm," which was published in Sketches (1872) and A Curious Dream (1872). They exchanged letters and kept a mostly pleasant acquaintance; Clemens usually saw Beecher when he visited his sister Isabella Hooker, who was Clemens's neighbor and close friend in Hartford. A tricky publishing venture at the end of Beecher's life also revealed Clemens's ambivalence toward the celebrity pastor. On 3 January 1887 Charles Webster informed Clemens that Beecher was considering an autobiography: “Beecher seemed to think that it might be a pretty good thing to do, and he also seemed to think that other things being equal, he would rather have us publish it than any one else. . . . I do not love Beecher any more than you do, but I love his money just as well, and I am certain that that book would sell.” (Beecher had also been advanced a substantial sum by Webster to complete his Jesus, Life of the Christ, which he also did not finish.) Beecher's death complicated these publishing plans, and in 1888 Clemens settled for the unprofitable biography completed by his son William and son-in-law Samuel Scoville (N&J3, pp. 272, 276).

William C. Beecher was Henry Ward Beecher's son. He practiced law and wrote a biography of his father, Henry Ward Beecher: A Sketch of His Career (Hartford: American Publishing Company, 1887).

Boyesen was a Norwegian novelist, critic, and professor of German at Cornell University. He met Clemens in the late 1870s and got to know him well during his stay in Paris in 1879 while he was finishing A Tramp Abroad. He also introduced Clemens to Turgenev (see Mark Twain's NB 18, NB&J2, pp. 285–350).

Noah Brooks began his newspaper career in Boston at the age of eighteen, but six years later he went west, eventually settling in California, where he founded the Marysville Appeal. During the Civil War he served as Washington correspondent for the Sacramento Union, and was reputedly the last journalist to interview Abraham Lincoln. After the war he became managing editor of the San Francisco Alta California, when became acquainted with Clemens, initially through their mutual friend Bret Harte (Brooks contributed short fiction, as did Clemens, to Harte's Overland Monthly). Brooks was the managing editor of the Alta California when Clemens undertook the Quaker City voyage in 1867 as an Alta correspondent (furnishing the material for Innocents Abroad). In 1871 Brooks started working for the New York Tribune, and in 1876 he became the editor of the New York Times. Retiring in 1892, he spent the rest of his life publishing travel literature and memoirs. In his Autobiography, Clemens recalled that Brooks was "a man of sterling character and equipped with a right heart, also a good historian where facts were not essential" ( AutoMT1, 228).

Buel was an editor and author who worked at the New York Tribune and Century Magazine. With Robert Underwood Johnson he coedited the acclaimed Battles and Leaders of the Civil War (1887–88).

H. C. Bunner was a writer and editor who oversaw Puck, the influential humor magazine. His novels included The Midge (1882) and The Story of a New York House (1883), yet he was best known for short stories and sketches about life in New York City, in particular those collected in Short Sixes (1891). His collaborations with Brander Matthews also pushed the boundaries of the short story genre. Clemens probably met Bunner in 1883, when both were inducted into the Kinsmen Club, and they both attended a dinner for Laurence Hutton at the Tile Club in New York City in 1885. Clemens also jotted in his notebook in 1886 to read Bunner's The Midge (N&J3, pp. 105, 115, 240). Clemens was also a frequent houseguest at Bunner's New York City home near Old Battery Park (see NB 33, entry for 9 December 1893, and his 8 December 1893 letter to Olivia Clemens, MSS in CU-MARK).

William Carey worked on the editorial staff of the Century Magazine for twenty years, as well as acting as a liaison between editors and production men (Arthur John, The Best Years of the Century [University of Illinois Press, 1981], 116). A legendary wit and popular with authors, he was also a member of the Authors Club.

Collyer was a blacksmith from Yorkshire, England, who became a Methodist lay preacher, and later an ordained Unitarian minister in the United States, serving as pastor of Unity Church in Chicago from 1859 until 1879. In 1879 he became the pastor of Church of the Messiah in New York City. In addition to being a popular lecturer, Collyer published several sermons, lectures, and books such as Life of A. H. Conant (1868), Father Taylor (1906), and Clear Grit (1913).

Austin Dunham was a wool merchant, inventor, and president of the Hartford Electric Light Company. In 1870 he joined the Monday Evening Club, where Clemens had read before (see Clemens's 11 January 1876 letter to William Dean Howells at MTPO). The Dunhams were also good friends with Clemens's friend and collaborator Charles Dudley Warner.

Charles Duncan was the captain of the Quaker City when Clemens traveled to Europe and the Levant in 1867. Duncan had gone to sea as a boy and was a ship captain before he was thirty. In 1853 he became a shipping and commission merchant in New York City, operating as Charles C. Duncan and Company. Shortly before the Civil War, he resettled in England and resumed business there while leaving the New York office in the hands of a subordinate, who absconded with the firm’s funds, precipitating its bankruptcy after Duncan’s return in 1865. The Quaker City excursion was in part a means of recovering from the bankruptcy. Duncan also lectured on the excursion, in New York on 3 and 26 December 1867, in Washington on January 1868, in Cleveland on 10 March 1868, and again in New York on 11 January 1877, when he attacked Clemens by declaring that Innocents Abroad was “in no sense” an accurate account of the trip (“About Mark Twain,” New York World, 12 January 1877, 5). Clemens showed his contempt for Duncan in his unpublished partial draft of a Quaker City play, depicting him as the mercenary “Capt. Dusenberry” (see Appendix E of L2; also the enclosure, n. 1, of Clemens's 25 November 1867 letter to Charles Henry Webb). Over the years he and Duncan were intermittently contentious, specifically in 1883, when Clemens spoke out in support of Elihu Root's corruption investigation into Duncan's finances as shipping commissioner ( 8 January 1868 to Beach, 10 March 1868 to Fairbanks, L2, pp. 149 n. 6, 203 n. 1; N&J2, p. 35; N&J3, pp. 18, 24–25). Duncan was dismissed in 1884 as shipping commissioner of the port of New York City.

Jenkins was born in Boontown, N.J., and graduated from Yale in 1874. He moved to New York City, where he boarded with fellow April Fool letter writer Horatio C. King, and through that connection soon became Henry Ward Beecher's secretary. He was connected with the Christian Union in various capacities, including as publisher in 1878–79, and then joined a banking firm, advancing to senior partner. However, the firm went into receivership in 1890. After two more failed ventures in managing mines in Minnesota and Cuba, he formed the Jenkins Coal Company. Through his association with Beecher and his memberships in the Lambs and Players Clubs, he formed acquaintances with Warner, Hutton, Stedman, and Clemens, as he claimed in a letter to the Yale alumni club. Clemens's annotation on Jenkins's envelope identifies him as a “stranger” in 1884. Jenkins never married. He died of Bright's disease at his home in the Hotel Ansonia in 1913.

Eggleston was a journalist, historian, and novelist raised in southern Indiana. He was practicing law in Richmond, Va., when the Civil War broke out, and served as a Confederate officer (he later witnessed the surrender at Appomattox). From 1871 to 1875 he served as the editor of Hearth and Home magazine, where he made the acquaintance of William Dean Howells. In 1875 he published a well-regarded memoir of his service entitled A Rebel's Recollections, which later formed the subject of his majestic two-volume History of the Confederate War. He was also known for Southern novels such as Dorothy South, A Carolina Cavalier, and Irene of the Mountains.

Charles Fairchild was born and raised in Ohio. After graduating from Harvard in 1858, he served in the Union Army and briefly attended Harvard Law (without taking a degree) before entering the paper manufacturing business. He was “a close friend and drinking companion of James R. Osgood and his knights of the quill—Aldrich, Samuel Clemens, and William Dean Howells." He helped Howells to finance his house in Belmont, and for a brief time in the early 1880s they were neighbors. Clemens probably first met him in 1874 at the banquet at the Parker House in Boston for Atlantic Monthly contributors and supporters. (Fairchild had advanced $20,000 to Melancthon Hurd and Henry Houghton to purchase ownership of the magazine from James R. Osgood.) (L6, p. 319). He was also the brother of Gen. Lucius Fairchild, the Civil War veteran, diplomat, and tenth governor of Wisconsin.

Mary (Fox) Fiske, a Hartford native, wrote plays and drama criticism under the nom de plume "Giddy Gusher." She married the journalist and dramatist Stephen Fiske in 1875.

Charles Frohman was a theater manager and producer, notably of the touring Wallack Theatre Company and the Lyceum. In 1900 he met with Clemens to discuss producing The End of the Earth, a play he cowrote with Sydney Rosenfeld. Rosenfeld wrote to the New York Dramatic Mirror on 22 April 1898 that he had concluded an agreement with Mark Twain to collaborate on a play, a rough draft of which he had received. On 22 October 1900 the two men met with Frohman, but nothing came of the meeting. In August 1902 Rosenfeld announced to the press that he would produce the play under contract with Leander Sire, possibly as the maiden play for a projected (but never constructed) new theater. It seems never to have made it to the stage. Frohman was among the passengers who died when the Germans sank the RMS Lusitania.

Charles Frohman's older brother, Daniel, started his career as an office boy for the New York Tribune, and then spent five years as a journalist before managing touring companies for New York City theaters. In 1880 he organized the Lyceum Theater, which made him famous (and many other actors, such as E. H. Sothern, Henry Miller, and May Robson). He was also a member of the Players Club, where Clemens would also appear. In 1911 Frohman published his Memoirs of a Manager. He also played a role in the early film industry with the Famous Players Film Company.

Robert Gifford was an artist best known for his landscape paintings, particularly of the American West, New England, and North Africa. An early member of the Society of American Artists, he was also friends with Clemens's friend the artist Frank Millet, who traveled with Gifford to Germany and Scandinavia in 1882.

Jeannette Gilder was a journalist who corresponded for the Chicago Tribune and served as the associate editor of Putnam's Magazine and the Critic and Good Literature. She was the daughter of the clergyman William Henry Gilder and the sister of the poet and editor Richard Watson Gilder. In 1881–82 Clemens and she had a row about a spurious letter to the editor in the Critic which asked why Clemens had not given credit to the source of his story "A Curious Episode," and Clemens responded by sending an excoriating letter to the editor which assumed the editor was a man (Gilder to SLC, 6 December 1881; SLC to Gilder, 12 December 1881, MSS in CU-MARK). Gilder and Clemens were both apologetic for their respective blunders, and Gilder later made a gratuitous gesture by sending Clemens the original manuscript of Holmes's poem to commemorate Clemens's fiftieth birthday in 1885 (Gilder to SLC, 14 December 1881; SLC to Boyesen, 11 January 1882; Gilder to SLC, 9 December 1885, MSS in CU-MARK).

Col. John Gowen was an engineer and investor who defined his career by raising the Russian fleet of more than seventy ships after they were sunk at Sevastopol during the Crimean War. He was also an early member of the Lotos Club.

Julian Hawthorne, the son of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Sophia Peabody, was a noted journalist and writer in his own right (mostly of mystery stories), and Clemens's library eventually included his 1885 novel Noble Blood and his 1903 study of his father, Hawthorne and His Circle (Gribben, Mark Twain's Library, 1:301). He met Clemens in the early 1870s and remained good friends with him until his death. During this time he was also employed as the literary editor of the New York World. They both belonged to the American Copyright League and the Authors Club. About his friendship with Clemens, Hawthorne recalled that "I found him as most people did, delightful and fruitful, and very much as he was in his best writing," adding that "He never seemed to be a very happy man ... his mind was too active, searching out and sincere not to be troubled by the riddle of the Universe" ("Mark Twain as I Knew Him," Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine 87 [April 1929]: 111).

John Hay was a writer and statesman who grew up in Warsaw, Ill., a small town about sixty miles from Clemens's hometown of Hannibal, Mo.—a common background fostered his long friendship with Clemens. After graduating from Brown University, Hay began his illustrious career in public service as an assistant private secretary to Abraham Lincoln. Hay met Clemens in the late 1860s, and in 1871 Clemens offered Hay part ownership of the Buffalo Express, and to join him in a trip down the Mississippi to furnish material for what would appear in 1875 as the "Old Times on the Mississippi" series in the January-June and August issues of the Atlantic Monthly. Hay declined both offers. Clemens also appreciated Hay's Pike County Ballads (1871) for its verisimilitude to their boyhood region (see also SLC to John M. Hay, 6? January 1871). In 1870 Hay accepted an editorial position on the New York Tribune under Horace Greeley, and, after Greeley’s death in 1872, assisted the new editor, Whitelaw Reid. He gave up his Tribune position in 1875 and pursued a literary career as a poet, novelist, and biographer of Lincoln. Until about 1890 Hay's friendship with Clemens was lukewarm, kept up mostly through mutual friends, but their relationship changed in 1898, when Hay became secretary of state under the McKinley (and later Roosevelt) administration. Despite Clemens's anti-imperialist polemics (and Hay's support for Clemens's foe Theodore Roosevelt), their affection for each other remained solid until Hay's death in 1905 (see AutoMT1, pp. 222–24 ). In a 27 August 1907 autobiographical dictation, Clemens reminisced, "Hay was a man of great and varied talents and accomplishments, and was conspicuously well equipped for the several great national and international posts which he had filled in his brilliant career; and he climbed to several of them without the help of wealth, and would doubtless have climbed the rest of the way without that help, and all the public would have approved, and would also have affectionately applauded and rejoiced" ( AutoMT3, p. 112 ).

Joseph Howard Jr. was a prominent journalist who worked for the Brooklyn Eagle, the New York Herald, and the New York World. During the Civil War he was briefly imprisoned for creating a hoax document with Francis Avery Mallison alleging that Lincoln had requested a draft for 400,000 troops (just months after the destruction wreaked by the New York City draft riots). Howard was released only because of Henry Ward Beecher's personal appeal to Lincoln. In addition to being a member of Beecher's Plymouth Church, he published a biography of Beecher in 1887. He was also a founding member of the New York Press Club. In a manuscript fragment discovered in one of Clemens's books, he called Howard a "cesspool-siphon of night-cart journalism" (Item #497, A1911 Auction Catalog facsimile, in CU-MARK).

Editor and critic Laurence Hutton, one of a handful of friends whom Clemens addressed in letters by his nickname (“Larry”), served as drama critic of the Daily Evening Mail from 1872 to 1874 and literary critic of Harper's Magazine from 1886 to 1898. He compiled several important dramatic compendia, e.g. Actors and Actresses of Great Britain and the United States, 5 vols. (1886–87), which he coedited with Brander Matthews. He was a founding member of the Authors and Players Clubs and of the American Copyright League. Hutton was also a notorious collector of death masks and association copies.

English stage actor Henry Irving was born John Henry Broadribb, the son of a traveling salesman in Somerset. His first professional appearance was as the Duke of Orleans in Bulwer-Lytton's Richelieu in September 1856 at the New Royal Lyceum Theatre, Sunderland. In 1871 he joined the Lyceum Theatre in London under the management of Hezekiah Bateman, where he won acclaim for his performance in The Bells, an adaptation of Erckmann-Chatrian's Le Juif Polonais. He took over the management of the Lyceum Theatre from Bateman in 1878, the beginning of his long stage and personal partnership with Ellen Terry. In 1895 he became the first actor to receive a knighthood. During a provincial farewell tour in Bradford he was taken ill and died of a stroke hours later.

Poet, journalist, and conservationist Robert Underwood Johnson began working for Scribner's Magazine in 1873, and was named associate editor of the Century Magazine in 1881. He succeeded Richard Watson Gilder as editor, and retired in 1913. Johnson campaigned for international copyright in the 1880s, and, as the secretary of the American Copyright League, played an important role in passing the copyright law of 1891. He was one of the supporters of the foundation of both Yosemite National Park and, along with John Muir, the Sierra Club.

Soprano and musical actress Clara Louise Kellogg was considered the first American prima donna. She made her professional debut as Gilda in Rigoletto in February 1861 at the New York Academy of Music. Over the next two decades she sang in over forty roles in several languages. By the mid-1880s she was reduced to sporadic concert engagements, and retired shortly after marrying her manager, Carl Strakosch, in 1887. She died in New Hartford, Conn. She was a close friend of the Gilder family and a frequent participant in the Gilder Friday “At Home” gatherings.

Born at Simsbury, Conn., Jane Elizabeth Crosby was the mother of Clara Louise Kellogg. She became her daughter's constant companion and manager on tour, “the sentinel that stood between her daughter and the outside world.” Harriet Prescott Spofford describes Clara's mother as “a case of suppressed genius,” who “might have made a great mark on the artistic world if she had not so forgotten and absorbed herself in her daughter” (Spofford, Our Famous Women: An Authorized Record of the Lives and Deeds of Distinguished American Women of Our Times [Hartford, Conn.: A. D. Worthington, 1884], 359–85).

Horatio Collins King was a decorated Civil War officer, lawyer, publisher of the Christian Union and the Christian at Work in the 1870s, and longtime member of Beecher's Plymouth Church, which had been founded by his father-in-law, Joseph Tasker Howard. In 1878 he left publishing and was appointed major of the Thirteenth Regiment of the New York National Guard, of which he was later made judge advocate general. He was active in Democratic politics, but was never successful in winning an office.

John Coddington Kinney was an associate editor of the Hartford Courant (1872–90), and was appointed US marshal for the district of Connecticut (1882–86). In 1890, the year before he died, he was made postmaster of Hartford. During the Civil War he had been a member of the signal corps on Farragut's ship, the Hartford, and wrote about his experiences in “An August Morning with Farragut: A Narrative of the Mobile Bay Fight, August 5, 1864,” Scribner's Magazine 22 (June 1881): 199–208.

Thomas Wallace Knox, a Civil War correspondent for the New York Herald, is best known for his series of forty travel adventure books for boys. His war letters were collected in 1866 as Campfire and Cottonfields. After the war he traveled as a Herald correspondent with the Russo-American Telegraph Company, which built the first telegraph line across Siberia. In 1870 the American Publishing Company published these letters as Overland Through Asia. In 1877 he traveled around the world, gathering material for his series of books. The series list serves as an itinerary for his travels. In 1881 the King of Siam conferred upon him a knighthood in the Order of the White Elephant in return for his service to the country. He was the first American to receive that honor. Knox, who never married, made his home at the Lotos Club and was club secretary from 1880 to 1889. He was also a member of the Authors Club.

Joseph Hatton was a journalist (notably for the Sunday Times) and prolific popular writer. In addition to writing over thirty novels and running a popular column called "Cigarette Papers," he published a biography in 1884 of Henry Irving after traveling with him on tour. In Hatton's book on Irving, he also established himself as an ally in Clemens's crusade for improved copyright laws between the United States and Great Britain (328–29). Just before he died, Hatton wrote on 7 July 1907 that recently "Mark Twain came to see me. I had got into the garden nicely packed up in blankets, and was asleep—that sort of dreamy sleep when you don't quite know whether you are asleep or awake. He was very kind and sympathetic, and we had a very pleasant chat" (M.A.P., 10 August 1907, pp. 157–58).

Charles McKnight Leoser was born in Reading, Penn., and attended West Point. He commanded the Fire Zouaves during the Civil War and mustered out at the rank of colonel. He was the publisher of Bonfort's Wine and Spirits Circular, and president of the Wine and Spirits Traders' Society of New York. He served as president of the Lotos Club from 1872 to 1874, and two of his poems appear in Lotos Leaves (1875) (New York Times, 26 February 1896, 5).

All that is known of Macneill is that he was an employee of the Callender Insulating and Waterproofing Co., a purveyor of insulated cables incorporated in 1883 and owned by W. O. Callender of London, whose son, William M. Callender, served as president. Macneill may have been brought over from the London office.

Brander Matthews was a writer, novelist, critic, and professor of dramatic literature at Columbia University from 1892 to 1924. After earning a law degree from Columbia in 1873, Matthews chose to pursue a literary career. By 1884 he had published The Theatres of Paris (1880) and French Dramatists of the Nineteenth Century (1881), as well as two novels. The April Fool letter is the first extant piece of correspondence between Clemens and Matthews, whose friendship grew in subsequent decades. They were both members of the Kinsmen Club, the Authors Club, and the American Copyright League.

Elizabeth Greely Merrill, the daughter of Rev. Horatio Merrill of Springfield, Mass., married artist Frank D. Millet in Paris in 1879, with Clemens as best man and sculptor Augustus Saint Gaudens as witness. In 1885 the Millets moved to Broadway, a small village in Worcestershire, which had become an artists' colony attracting the likes of William Morris, John Singer Sargent, and Edward Burne-Jones.

Henry Lillie Pierce was a politician and millionaire chocolate magnate, and an intimate friend of Thomas Bailey Aldrich. In 1849 he secured a position as a clerk in the Baker chocolate factory in Dorchester, owned by his step-uncle. By 1854, on the death of the heir, Walter Baker, the trustees gave Pierce a ten-year lease on the factory. He had organized the company so successfully that not only was he able to serve as member of the US House of Representatives from 1873 to 1877 and as mayor of Boston in 1872 and 1878, but by the end of his second ten-year lease the property was conveyed to him by the trustees. Pierce and Thomas Bailey Aldrich were the closest of friends from around 1873 until Pierce's death. He left the family a life interest in Redman Farm, his house and land at Ponkapog, and a total bequest of $400,000. (James Bugbee, “Memoir of Henry Lillie Pierce,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 2nd ser., vol. 11 [Boston: Massachuessetts Historical Society, 1896–97], 386–410; “A Model Citizen,” The Critic 30 [January 9, 1897], 22).

Treasurer of the Union Manufacturing Company and president of the Hartford Silk Company, Thomas Fitzpatrick Plunkett fled to Mexico in 1889 to escape embezzlement charges. He was rumored to have been murdered there shortly after his escape, but apparently lived in Mexico until shortly before he died in Tucson, Ariz., in 1905. The Beach family of Hartford were financial supporters of both companies, and Charles M. Beach was appointed receiver for the Union Mfg. Co. Plunkett was a member of the Hartford Club. His father, Massachusetts politician Thomas F. Plunkett (senior), had been a member of the Monday Evening Club.

James Burton Pond was a decorated Civil War officer and lecture manager who fought with John Brown in 1846 in Kansas, and against Quantrill's gang in Missouri. In 1874 he formed the Pond Lyceum Bureau, having spent some years managing acts on his own in Salt Lake City, followed by a stint with the Redpath Lyceum Bureau. By 1884 he had managed Henry Ward Beecher, Wendell Phillips, Matthew Arnold, and George Washington Cable. Pond wrote several books and articles about his experiences on the lecture circuit, including A Summer in England with Henry Ward Beecher (1877) and Eccentricities of Genius (1900).

Nella Brown Pond was a dramatic reader and the wife of Ozias W. Pond. Despite early success with the Park Dramatic Company in Boston, she chose not to pursue a life on the stage, but channeled her dramatic talents into the platform by joining James Redpath's Lyceum Bureau.

Ozias Walter Pond was a younger brother of James B. Pond and a manager of musical acts and lecturers for the Redpath Lyceum Bureau. In 1883 he accompanied Henry Ward Beecher on a farewell lecture tour that extended into the spring of 1884. On 1 April he was with Beecher on the road between platform stops in Harrisburg and Cincinnati. Although in his letter to Clemens he claimed a meager acquaintance, he would soon come to know both Clemens and Cable very well—in January 1885 he accompanied the pair on their lecture tour in his brother's place. At the end of the month, however, he was forced to leave the tour due to illness.

Stillman S. Conant was a journalist who contributed to several prominent periodicals of the day, including the Galaxy, to which Clemens also contributed. He also translated into English (from a German translation) Mikhail Lermontov's poem The Circassian Boy (Boston: James R. Osgood and Co., 1875). In 1869 he became the managing editor of Harper's Weekly, a position he held until 1885, when he disappeared off the coast of Coney Island. In 1890 the New York Times reported the discovery of a skeleton in the dunes near Rockaway Beach that was believed to be Conant, but that was never verified ("A Skeleton in the Dunes: The Disappearance of Stillman S. Conant Recalled," New York Times, 14 December 1890, 8).

Rossiter Worthington Raymond was born and raised in Syracuse, N.Y. After graduating from Brooklyn Polytechnic he enrolled in the Royal Mining Academy at Freiburg, followed by studies at Heidelberg and Munich. He edited The American Journal of Mining from 1867 to 1890. In 1868 he was appointed US commissioner of mining statistics, and spent nearly a decade surveying mines in the West. In the early 1870s he also taught mining engineering at Lafayette College in Easton, Penn. He served as secretary of the American Institute of Mining, Metallurgy, and Petroleum Engineers from 1884 to 1911. In 1884 he lived in Brooklyn, where he was a member of Beecher's Plymouth Church. He served as the director of the Boy's Sunday School for nearly fifty years.

The identity of this letter writer remains a mystery. He or she used the return address of the Gilders' home, and may have been a house guest at the time that the Cable circular arrived. Barring a complete and unlikely transformation of hand and signature, it cannot be Clemens's Hartford friend Henry C. Robinson. In addressing the envelope to C. L. Clemens, he or she reveals either ignorance of Clemens's first name, or a ruse to further obfuscate his or her own identity by pretending not to know Clemens's first name.

Canadian-born Napoleon Sarony, celebrity photographer, lithographer and sketch artist, was trained as a lithographer in his father's business. In 1833 he moved to New York City, where he worked for Robertson & Co. lithographers. After the death of his wife he traveled to Europe to study fine arts, but financial straits led him to photography, which he learned in his brother's Birmingham studio. He returned to New York in 1865 to set up a studio. In the fall of 1884 Clemens and George Washington Cable visited Sarony for tour photographs. Sarony belonged to the Lotos Club and was a founding member of the Salmagundi Club.

Horace Elisha Scudder was a Boston journalist, children's writer, biographer, and editor of the Riverside Magazine and, later, the Atlantic Monthly, following Thomas Bailey Aldrich. He had a long association of various publishing partnerships with H. O. Houghton as a minority partner, along with George H. Mifflin, in the 1870s. He is best known for the Bodley Books (1875–87), The Children's Book (1881), History of the United States . . . for the Use of Schools and Academies (1884), and Letters of Bayard Taylor (1884).

Wesley Sisson practiced law with his brother in Chicago from 1876 until 1881, when he moved to New York City to pursue a career in theatrical management. He was the assistant manager of the Madison Square Theatre in the 1880s, with concurrent management interests in the Lyceum and Criterion Theaters. He also managed tours for several companies, including those of Clara Morris, and Thomas and Alessandro Salvini. In 1891 he moved with his family back to Chicago to return to his law practice, while exploring prospects for building a new theater on the South Side. By 1890 they had moved back east again, to Mount Vernon, N.Y., where Sisson is listed in the 1910 census as secretary of the Postal Life Insurance Company, a position which he held until he retired.

Civil engineer, artist, and writer Francis Hopkinson Smith was a friend and clubmate of Clemens. At the time of his death he was best known as an author and illustrator of his own works. He was also a successful landscape painter. Among his engineering projects were the construction of Race Rock Lighthouse and the base of the Statue of Liberty. He was a founding member of the Kinsman Club and the Tile Club.

Poet and critic Edmund Clarence Stedman was born in Hartford and attended Yale. In his youth he worked as a correspondent for the Sun and the Tribune. He was a member of the Pfaff's Cellar bohemians before the Civil War, as were many others in this group. After the war he became a banker on Wall Street from 1865 to 1890, but continued to write and publish poetry and literary criticism. In 1887 Stedman succeeded in foisting his Library of American Literature compilation upon Clemens's nephew and business partner, Charles L. Webster, a decision that led to the “lingering suicide” of the publishing firm (AD of 2 June 1906, AutoMT1).

Ellen Terry was the leading British stage actress in Shakespearean roles of her day. Her first performance in 1856 was as Mamilius in The Winter's Tale at the Princess Theatre, London, where she remained until the retirement of Charles Kean in 1859. In 1878 Terry joined Irving's company at the Lyceum. She had a long professional and personal relationship with Henry Irving.

In the 1860s Watrous was a US mail agent in San Francisco, where he befriended Bret Harte (see, for instance, Axel Nissen's Bret Harte, Prince and Pauper [Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000], 239.) As such he probably had at least a passing acquaintance with Noah Brooks. He was forced to step down from his position due to his involvement in a vote-buying scandal to elect Timothy Guy Phelps US senator from California (Portland Oregonian, 10 February 1863, 2). Watrous moved to New York, where he went into the lumber business with his brother-in-law. A member of the Union League, he was involved in the purge of the Tweed ring in 1871. In 1891 he returned to San Francisco with a group of capitalists and engineers sent overland to explore the possibility of a canal through Nicaragua, and died as a result of an illness contracted while inspecting the canal site en route (“The Big Canal: One of the Miller Party Talks of It,” San Francisco Chronicle, 19 May 1891, 2).

Charles Goodrich Whiting had a long association, beginning in 1868, with the Springfield Republican as a writer (and, after 1874, as literary editor) of bucolic essays and poems in his Sunday column “The Saunterer.” He was elected to the Authors Club of New York in 1888. Cable's first reading of his 1883 tour was in Springfield, and a very favorable review, possibly written by Whiting, appeared in the Republican on 22 November.

J. W. Beach was a Hartford businessman who co-owned Beach and Company with his brothers George and Charles. It is not known when he met Clemens, but his membership in the Hartford Club suggests that he could have known Clemens, who often socialized there.

Charles de Kay was a poet, critic, and founder of the New York Fencers' Club. He took a degree at Yale and spent two years in the company of the literary and artistic celebrities who frequented the salon of his aunt Katherine de Kay Bronson in Paris and Venice. He was the art and literary critic for the New York Times from 1876 to 1894. He was also a founding member of the Authors Club in 1882 and of the National Arts Club in 1899. From 1894 to 1897 he served as consul general in Berlin.

Fiske was a journalist, drama critic, and theater manager who started his career with the New York Herald. After the Civil War he lived in Rome, where he joined Garibaldi, and then moved to London, where he became the manager of the Royal English Opera Company. Returning to New York City in 1874, he managed the Fifth Avenue Theatre (where Madame Modjeska made her famous debut), contributed dramatic criticism to The Spirit of the Times, and started the New York Dramatic Mirror. He married the writer Mary Fox in 1875. He was also known for several plays, including Corporal Cartouche, Martin Chuzzlewit, and My Noble Son-in-Law. He was a noted member of Pfaff's cellar, having established himself during the Civil War as a "Pfaff's bohemian."

Henry Peters Gray served for the New York Volunteers as an assistant adjutant general during the Civil War, and after the war was a longstanding employee of Tiffany & Company.

Sara Thomson Kinney, the wife of John Coddington Kinney, was active in the Daughters of the American Revolution and the Women's National Indian Association. In 1884, after attending the second annual Lake Mohonk Conference for Friends of the Indian, she joined the WNIA Home-Building and Loan Committee, whose purpose was to encourage Native American women to assimilate into white society.

E. K. Lockwood and his wife, Harriet, were passengers with Clemens on the Quaker City excursion to the Holy Land in 1867. Lockwood started out as a clerk in his father's business and inherited his father's interests in the Winnipauk Woollen Mill in 1869. As his letterhead states, in 1884 he was primarily a purveyor of house furnishing goods. Like his father, he held the positions of director of the Norwalk Gas Light Company and the National Bank of Norwalk.

Helena Modjeska, whose name on her birth certificate was Jadwiga Benda, was baptized Helena Opid in Krakow. She took as her stage name a simplified version of the stage name of her first husband, Gustaw Zimajer, who went by “Gustaw Modrzejewski.” Under his management she solidified her reputation as the leading tragic actress on the Polish stage. In 1875 she emigrated to California with her second husband, Karol Bozenta Chlapowski. She eventually made her way to the New York stage, with the support of the Gilder circle. After three years in London she returned to New York with further accolades. She retired from the stage in 1907 (Modjeska, Memories and Impressions of Helena Modjeska [New York: Macmillan, 1910]; New York Times, 9 April 1909).

George William Sheldon, art critic and author, graduated from Princeton University in 1863 and spent a year as a medic in the Union Army. He worked as an instructor of languages and literature for a decade at Princeton and then at Union Theological Seminary. From 1876 to 1882 he was an art critic for the New York Evening Post, and from 1884 to 1886 the dramatic critic of the New York Commercial Advertiser. He held a concurrent post on the staff of Appleton & Co., for whom he wrote elaborately illustrated art books such as American Painters (1879), Hours with Art and Artists (1882), and Artistic Homes (1882). A year after the April Fool episode, an unsolicited $300 subscription to Artistic Homes was a great cause of consternation to Clemens (see SLC's 8 February 1885 letter to Olivia Clemens, MS in CU-MARK; and 8 February 1885 to Charles L. Webster, MS in Vassar).

Ellen D. Stedman was the wife of recently embroiled broker Frederick Stuart Stedman, the son of poet Edmund Clarence Stedman. She and her daughter, Laura, were Edmund Clarence Stedman's mainstays in his old age.

The first wife of Col. George E. Waring Jr., and mother of Effie, Virginia Waring died in 1891 in Newport, R.I. (Newport Mercury, 12 December 1891, 1).

Essayist and novelist Charles Dudley Warner was one of Clemens's neighbors at Nook Farm in Hartford, and coauthor of The Gilded Age (1873). In the 1860s he was an editor of the Hartford Press, and then of the Hartford Courant, when the two papers merged. He joined the staff of Harper's Magazine in 1884 and was responsible for "The Editor's Drawer" feature until 1892, when he took on "The Editor's Study."

Richard Watson Gilder was a poet, journalist, editor, and one of the founders of the American Copyright League. His editorial career at the helm of the Century Magazine spanned from the death of his predecessor, J. G. Holland, in 1881 (when Scribner's Magazine became the Century Magazine) to his own death in 1909. He married the painter Helena de Kay, founder of the Society of American Artists, and their home, a converted stable named "the Studio," was a gathering place for artists, players, and writers. Gilder was a founding member of the Authors Club, which was organized in 1882 and incorporated in 1887.

H. B. Vandiver was an autograph hunter from Weaverville, N.C., who fancied himself “Nicodemus Dodge.” He was the son of Rev. Dr. J. W. Vandiver, a Methodist pastor, and a seedsman of some renown in Weaverville. Like most of his siblings, Harry Vandiver attended Weaverville College.