The basic idea, also quite modern (think “Six Feet Under”), was to throw a typical Horatio Alger hero into a family of undertakers (ladies and gentlemen, meet the Cadaver family) and then let the formulaic story work itself out. Paine reminds us that during the summer months Mark Twain typically spent the day writing, up on a hill above the family home in Elmira, at the end of which he descended and read aloud his day’s work to the family:

Once, when for a day he put aside other matters to record a young undertaker’s love-affair, and brought down the result in the evening, fairly bubbling with the joy of it, he met with a surprise. The tale was a ghastly burlesque, its humor of the most disheartening, unsavory sort. No one spoke during the reading, nobody laughed. The air was thick with disapproval. His voice lagged and faltered toward the end. When he finished there was heavy silence. Mrs. Clemens was the only one who could speak. “Youth, let’s walk a little,” she said.

 

A few weeks later Mark Twain asked his friend William Dean Howells to “tell me what is the trouble with it.” We don’t know what Howells told him, but Mark Twain obviously did not throw the manuscript away. It is published in full for the first time here, and very possibly for the first audience capable of appreciating its humor as the author intended.

“Happy Memories of the Dental Chair” is manifestly autobiographical, and possibly incomplete—a report of his first encounter with a dentist, but in this case a rather extraordinary one: John Mankey Riggs of Hartford, who gave his name to Riggs’s Disease (what your dentist would call “pyorrhea”). Mark Twain is here characteristically fascinated by technical procedures, including Riggs’s part in the discovery and use of anesthetic: “an event of such vast influence, magnitude, importance, that one may truly say it hardly has its equal in human history.” Much as he admires Riggs for his part in that discovery, he also has him squarely in his sights: “He was gray and venerable, and humane of aspect; but he had the calm, possessed, surgical look of a man who could endure pain in another person.” Riggs died in 1885, shortly after this sketch was written, and that may have been partly why Mark Twain did not publish it.

Mark Twain also declined to publish, or sought to publish anonymously, things he thought would so outrage his audience that he would lose their support and undermine his family’s income. These are not heavily represented in this selection, but “The Missionary in World-Politics” manifestly qualifies. Its barely suppressed rage at European exploitation of the Chinese was intended for publication in the London Times shortly after the Siege of Peking, during the Boxer Rebellion. On 16 July 1900, Clemens wrote a cover letter for the manuscript to C. Moberly Bell, one of the Times’s editors, but he never sent either. The piece itself is not signed “Mark Twain,” but rather “X”—such sharply critical things could only be published, if at all, behind a cloak of anonymity. “Don’t give me away, whether you print it or not” he wrote Bell. It seems likely that he decided not to send it when the news reached him that the “massacre of the Ministers” (referred to bitterly in the penultimate paragraph) was only a false rumor, most of the diplomats having survived being attacked by the Boxers. In any case, Mark Twain’s withering denunciation of cultural imperialism—the cynical use of the missionaries by “the Concert of Christian Birds of Prey” to exploit the Chinese—has lost none of its relevance for today. “My sympathies are with the Chinese,” he wrote privately to Twichell. “They have been villainously dealt with by the sceptered thieves of Europe, & I hope they will drive all the foreigners out & keep them out for good. I only wish it; of course I don’t really expect it.” (He was less than a year away from his decision to publicly criticize American imperialism in the Philippines, beginning with a justly famous essay titled “To the Person Sitting in Darkness.”)

This pattern of second thoughts arising to restrain publication is evident throughout his career. “I Rise to a Question of Privilege” was written in May 1868 in direct response to a public rebuke he received from a Baptist clergyman in San Francisco—“and in very good grammar, too, for a minister of the gospel.” It was prepared specifically for publication in the San Francisco News Letter and California Advertiser, but Mark Twain probably never sent it, having thought twice about the effect so frank a critique of conventional religion might have on his then still fragile reputation. And he did not even finish writing “Interviewing the Interviewer,” an 1870 sketch written to retaliate against criticism aimed at him by Charles A. Dana, the famous editor of the New York Sun, almost certainly because he realized the futility of such public combat.

Eventually, in the last decade of his life, Mark Twain evolved the habit of writing what he wanted to write, no matter how incendiary, knowing all the while that he would not publish it, but simply put it into that “box of Posthumous Stuff” and let it be published after his death. He stipulates to this strategy in “The Privilege of the Grave,” written on 18 September 1905, the thesis of which is that a dead man “has one privilege which is not exercised by any living person: free speech.” Most of us, most of the time, suppress the truth about our genuine beliefs. “Sometimes we suppress an opinion for reasons that are a credit to us, not a discredit, but oftenest we suppress an unpopular opinion because we cannot afford the bitter cost of putting it forth. None of us likes to be hated, none of us likes to be shunned.” Of the pieces published here, perhaps only the dialect sketch called “The Snow-Shovelers” falls into this category. Its devilish needling of the “socialis” and the “anerkis” is quietly conveyed through the earnest conversation of two black laborers “in the elegant-residence end of a large New England town.” (Mark Twain lived in Hartford at the time, and doubtless overheard the real-life exchange that he here turned into satirical fiction.) But the finished piece was probably made to seem inappropriate by the Haymarket Riot of 4 May 1886, in which ostensible “anarchists” killed more than a dozen policemen and civilians with a bomb, and it remained unpublished.

Taken together, these short works give us a window into Mark Twain’s literary workshop, a fresh glimpse of his remarkable talent, lavished even on work he decided, for various reasons, not to publish.