I furnished it--in type-written capitals, SIGNATURE AND ALL.
It was long; it was a sermon; it contained advice; also reproaches.
I said writing was my TRADE, my bread-and-butter; I said it was
not fair to ask a man to give away samples of his trade; would he
ask the blacksmith for a horseshoe? would he ask the doctor for
a corpse?
Now I come to an important matter--as I regard it. In the year
'74 the young woman copied a considerable part of a book of mine
ON THE MACHINE. In a previous chapter of this Autobiography I
have claimed that I was the first person in the world that ever had
a telephone in the house for practical purposes; I will now claim
--until dispossess--that I was the first person in the world to APPLY
THE TYPE-MACHINE TO LITERATURE. That book must have been THE
ADVENTURES OF TOM SAWYER. I wrote the first half of it in '72,
the rest of it in '74. My machinist type-copied a book for me
in '74, so I concluded it was that one.
That early machine was full of caprices, full of defects--devilish ones.
It had as many immoralities as the machine of today has virtues.
After a year or two I found that it was degrading my character,
so I thought I would give it to Howells. He was reluctant, for he
was suspicious of novelties and unfriendly toward them, and he remains
so to this day. But I persuaded him. He had great confidence in me,
and I got him to believe things about the machine that I did not
believe myself.
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