NEW YORK — Mark Twain’s never-published “A Family Sketch” — a tribute to his daughter who died at 24 after contracting spinal meningitis — sold at auction Thursday for $242,500, far outpacing presale estimates.
The document was a tribute to Olivia “Susy” Clemens, who inspired two of his stories. The sale price surpassed the original estimate of $120,000 to $180,000. Sotheby’s did not identify the buyer.
The 64-page, handwritten document was among a trove of 200 Twain letters, manuscripts and photographs that were auctioned.
“Any Mark Twain archive or collector would be willing to go hungry for two or three years just in order to be able to buy it,” Robert Hirst, general editor of the Mark Twain Papers & Project at the University of California, Berkeley, said in a recent interview. The university holds the largest repository of Mark Twain material.
Hirst called it a “very intimate family record, with all of the charm both of Clemens himself,” his family and household servants. Twain was the pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens.
“She was a magazine of feelings, & they were of all kinds & of all shades of force,” Twain wrote of Susy in the sketch shortly after her death in 1896. She was also the inspiration for his “Joan of Arc” and “A Horse’s Tale.”
The total collection, which sold for more than $2.2 million, belonged to the late media executive James S. Copley, whose library of literary and historic manuscripts was being sold.
The University of California, which controls the copyright on “A Family Sketch” and virtually everything else by Mark Twain that is still protected by copyright, is editing and publishing Twain’s uncensored autobiography in its entirety for the first time.
The first of three volumes will be released by the UC Press in November on the 175th anniversary of his birth.
