Sale 2461 - Autographs, November 7, 2017

“THEREWAS NO ‘EYE ON SALES’—I NEVER HAVETHAT EYE” 272 c   TARKINGTON, BOOTH. Autograph Letter Signed, to “My dear Mr. Kennedy,” explaining why he wrote Alice Adams [1921]. 1 3 / 4 pages, 8vo, personal stationery; staple holes along left margin, folds. Kennebunkport, 12 November 1921 [350/500] “. . . [T]hank you for your letter about ‘Alise Adams.’ No; there was no ‘eye on sales’—I never have that eye during a writing. . . . I told my wife often that nobody would read it—’Why, nobody could stand these people!’ Yet I kept on digging into their insides and turning these insides out. “‘Why did he write it?’ That’s what I kept asking myself. I suppose . . . he wrote it at a very strong prompting—. . . a prompting to ‘make’ people actual—to put into a book people who had life and reality in them so that they should seem to make print alive. . . . In the course of many years of writing . . . one builds up a kind of inscrutable workman as one of one’s selves, and . . . [he] has his own secrets: it takes me quite a time to get at ‘em sometimes!” 273 c   TWAIN, MARK. Check endorsed,“Pay to order of Geo. / P. Bissell & Co. / Sam’l L. Clemens,” on verso, payable to Twain from his publisher Frank E. Bliss in the amount of $1722.65 drawn on the Grocers’ Bank. 8x3 inches; cancellation slices (not affecting his sig- nature), signature of Bissell belowTwain’s. Np, [June 1877] [400/600] 273 (Verso; Actual Size)