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New Mark Twain Stories Found By Researchers

New Mark Twain Stories Found By Researchers

Researchers in California have pieced together a series of letters written by Mark Twain when he was a young journalist in San Francisco.

In the letters, the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn author compared the city's police chief to a dog chasing its tail and accused the city government of "rascality".

Bob Hirst, general editor of the Mark Twain Project at the University of California, Berkeley, said: "This is a very special period in his life, when he's out here in San Francisco.

"He's utterly free, he's not encumbered by a marriage or much of anything else, and he can speak his mind and does speak his mind.

"These things are wonderful to read, the ones that survived."

Twain was thought to be 29 years old when he began filing near-daily columns for the Territorial Enterprise newspaper in Virginia City, Nevada, in 1865.

He wrote a 2,000-word story or "letter" six days a week for a salary of $100 a month.

Many of the letters were lost in fires, but researchers have trawled through the archives of other Western US newspapers to get copies of around 110 columns written in 1865 and 1866.

In one letter, Twain gives a detailed dialogue between two gold speculators trapped in a shift. The men were clinging to a rope tied to an old horse called Cotton.

He wrote: "Johnny, I've not lived as I ought to have lived. Damn that infernal horse!

"Johnny, if we are saved I mean to be a good man and a Christian."

At the time the letters were written, Twain was struggling with his career and was unsure if writing humourously counted as literature, Mr Hirst said.

Last year, plans to name a cove on Lake Tahoe after the celebrated American author were scrapped after a Native American tribe said he held racist views.

Born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835, Twain grew up in Hannibal, Missouri. He died in 1910.