The Washoe Giant in San Francisco: Being Heretofore Uncollected Sketches by Mark Twain, Published in the Golden Era in the Sixties, Including Those Blasted Children, the Lick House Ball, the Kearny Street Ghost Story, Fitz Smythe's Horse, and Thirty-Four

San Francisco, CA: George Fields, 1938. First Edition. Large octavo with olive and black boards in olive and black pictorial jacket; deckle edges; 143, [1] pages: illustrations; 25 cm A very good (-) copy; clean pages and tight binding; edges of boards are sunned; jacket is very good (-) to good (+); shows some sunning and chips to edgewear; small hole near front lower corner; now in archival mylar. Hardcover.

Fabulous black and white illustrations accompany these lesser-known tales. "Mark Twain, the boisterous young bachelor of San Francisco and the comstock, the "Wild Humorist of the Western Slope", is here presented in thrirty-eight sketches for the first time made available to the modern reader.Those Blasted Children, Fitz-Smythe's Horse, and the Kearny Street Ghost Story are typical of the articles which Mark Twain omitted from his first book because he was afraid that they were too rough for Eastern readers of the genteel tradition. They give a taste of the days whenwestern journalism was irreverent and lusty, when the Era was the most original journal in America, when Mark Twain was feeling his oats and kicking over the dashboard. [...] The sketches were collected by Dr. Franklin Walker, author of Franklin Norris: A Biography, who has supplied a detailed introduction and informal comments explaining topical allusions and relating the writings to the humorist's biography" --Jacket copy. "The complete list of Mark Twain material in "The golden era': p. 141-142 "Bibliographical note": p. 143