Instead, Harvey planned a feast at New York’s most prestigious restaurant, Delmonico’s, and (as biographer Albert Bigelow Paine put it), “invitations were sent out to practically every writer of any distinction in America, and to many abroad. When Colonel George Harvey, Twain’s editor and the president of Harper & Brothers, first suggested a birthday celebration, Twain imagined a small gathering of friends, perhaps in a nearby tavern or beer hall. Twain spent the rest of his birthday in his Fifth Avenue townhouse preparing a speech for the upcoming dinner that would make headlines in newspapers across the nation-an event that, because of the holiday, celebrated the seventieth birthday of America’s most famous writer five days after the fact. Rockefeller and who boasted descent from the Mayflower Pilgrims. It was a quiet day for the author he had lunch with his friends Emile and Henry Rogers-the latter a famous industrialist who built up Standard Oil with John D. Thus, on Thursday, November 30, 1905, Mark Twain’s seventieth birthday coincided with Thanksgiving. Until 1941, when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed legislation establishing the celebration of Thanksgiving on the fourth Thursday of each November, Americans marked the holiday on the last Thursday of November, in accordance with a proclamation issued by Abraham Lincoln in 1863. A 32-page supplement in the December 23, 1905, issue of the magazine included, along with a two-page spread of Adamson’s illustration, the texts of the speeches and full-page photographs of the guests at the event. “The Dinner at Delmonico’s in Honor of Mark Twain’s Seventieth Birthday.” Drawing by illustrator Sydney Adamson (fl. The Collected Shorter Works of Mark Twain “ Mark Twain as Our Emissary,” George Ade.“ Hunting the Deceitful Turkey,” Mark Twain.“ Colonel George Harvey: The Man Behind the Harper’s Mark Twain Contract,” including 1907 Washington Post article, “Mark Twain’s Exclusive Publisher Tells What The Humorist Is Paid.” ( TwainQuotes) 1905 New York Times article: “ Celebrate Mark Twain’s Seventieth Birthday: Fellow-Workers in Fiction Dine with Him at Delmonico’s” ( Mark Twain in His Times)
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