I wish to send you my special deep-felt personal thanks for your kindness & generosity to me—
Walt WhitmanCorrespondent:
Samuel Langhorne Clemens
(1835–1910), better know by his pen name, Mark Twain, was an American
humorist, novelist, lecturer, and publisher. Twain is best known for authoring
such novels as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), and Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894). Twain attended Whitman's
New York lecture on the death of Lincoln in April 1887. He also contributed to
Thomas Donaldson's fund for the purchase of a horse and buggy for Whitman (see Whitman's September 22, 1885, letter to Herbert Gilcrist), as well as to
the fund to build Whitman a private cottage (see Whitman's October 7, 1887, letter to Sylvester Baxter). Twain
was reported in the Boston Herald of May 24, 1887 to have
said: "What we want to do is to make the splendid old soul comfortable" (Clara
Barrus, Whitman and Burroughs: Comrades [New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1931],
268).