An unpublished Mark Twain mystery story has been sold by the Buffalo and Erie County (N.Y.) Public Library to the magazine it was intended for 125 years ago. After securing print and digital publication rights in December, the library accepted an offer from the Atlantic Monthly, for which Twain penned the short story in 1876, this time beating out the New Yorker magazine. Twain first pitched the story, titled “A Murder, a Mystery, and a Marriage,” to his Atlantic editor as one of a blind series by renowned authors of the day, but his idea never came to pass.
“We’re having the Atlantic change its mind, as it were, after 125 years,” said library attorney Patrick Martin, who found the manuscript among library files in 1995, according to a January 22 New York Times report. Since then the library negotiated publication rights with the Mark Twain Project—the licensee of the author’s papers at the University of California/Berkeley’s Bancroft Library—and the Mark Twain Foundation charitable trust in New York City.
Twain was once a Buffalo newspaper editor. The foundation emerged from a trust for his sole surviving child, Clara Clemens Samossoud, who died in 1962. In the mid-1990s the Buffalo library and the foundation negotiated with Random House to publish a comprehensive edition of Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
The library plans a digital version of the mystery as well as a national writing competition seeking alternative endings. It has sold the story to W. W. Norton to be published as a hardcover book in the fall. The Atlantic will run the story in July.
Posted January 29, 2001.