Letters from Hawaii

Mark Twain's Letters from Hawaii

Cover of the 1966 edition
Editor	A. Grove Day
Author	Mark Twain
Publisher	Appleton-Century
Publication date	1966
A collection of letters originally written in 1866.

Letters from Hawaii is a collection of 25 letters that Mark Twain wrote in 1866 from the Hawaiian Islands as a special correspondent for The Sacramento Union . The letters, written early in Twain's career, were not published as a book until 1937, nearly three decades after his death.

Twain later used the letters as the foundation for portions of Roughing It (1872). ^[1]

Summary

During his four-month and a day stay in the Hawaiian Islands, then called the Sandwich Islands, Twain visited the islands of Oahu, Maui, and Hawaii.

Oahu

Mark Twain arrives in Oahu under the reign of Kamehameha IV and wrote Letters 1-17. He climbed Diamond Head, visited the newly formed Kingdom of Hawaii legislature, etc.

Maui

Mark Twain visited Haleakala, Maui, but left no letter on his itinerary of his Maui visit, except some statistics of sugar production in Maui (Letter 23).

Hawaii

In Letters 18 to 25, Mark Twain writes about his visits to Kailua Kona, Kealakekua Bay, and Kilauea.

Publication History

The letters were first collected in book form, albeit with some omissions, in 1937 by Grabhorn Press, in a limited edition, under the title Letters from the Sandwich Islands. The first trade edition was published the following year by the Stanford University Press. In 1939, Thomas Nickerson published a limited edition titled Letters from the Honolulu. The first complete collection of the letters came in 1947, in an appendix to Walter F. Frear's Mark Twain and Hawaii, published by the Lakeside Press. ^[2]

In 1966, 100 years after their original publication, Appleton-Century published the complete letters as Mark Twain's Letters from Hawaii, edited and with an introduction by A. Grove Day. ^[3]

References

1. Day, A. Grove (1987). "Innocent Abroad in Hawaii: Mark Twain". Mad about Islands: Novelists of a Vanished Pacific. Honolulu, Hawaii: Mutual Publishing. p. 91. ISBN   978-0-935180-46-6. OCLC   17445516.
2. Frear, Walter Francis (1947). Mark Twain and Hawaii. Chicago: The Lakeside Press. pp. 256–261. OCLC   1810290.
3. Twain, Mark (1966). Day, A. Grove (ed.). Mark Twain's Letters from Hawaii. New York: Appleton-Century. OCLC   271356.

External links

• Mark Twain's Letters from Hawaii public domain audiobook at LibriVox
• Mark Twain Letters from Hawaii Study Guide
• The text of Letters from Hawaii