Laura Redden Searing Papers,
Western Historical Manuscript Collection-Columbia
Some Private Advice on Publishers:
Correspondence Between Laura C. Redden
and Samuel L. Clemens
BY JUDY YAEGER JONES*
In October 1997, the Missouri School for the Deaf (MSD) dedicated a
new dormitory in honor of alumna Laura Catherine Redden, who wrote
under the nom de plume of Howard Glyndon, and an exhibit of Redden artifacts is part of the school's museum. Yet today few Missourians outside
Fulton, where the school has been located since its 1851 founding by William
Dabney Kerr, an Old School Presbyterian and second-generation educator of
the deaf, would recognize her by either of her names, unlike her fellow
Missourian and 1881 correspondent, Samuel Clemens. The previously
unpublished Clemens letters that follow are part of the recently acquired personal papers of Redden entrusted by her family to the Western Historical
*Judy Yaeger Jones, an independent scholar and historian in St. Paul, Minnesota, formerly served as an educational consultant and project director for Minnesota Women's History
Month. She received a bachelor's degree in elective studies from the University of Minnesota,
Minneapolis. Jones is currently writing a full-length biography of Laura Redden Searing.
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