My quest for Colonel Sellers began in graduate school at the University of Oklahoma in 1973 or 1974. I was writing and producing a play based on Mark Twain short stories. During my research, I found out Twain was a frustrated playwright. I also learned that Twain had written two plays that were produced. One was a terrible disaster called Ah, Sin! which he had written with his friend Brett Hart. The other was a classed based on The Gilded Age. This play was hailed as "the play of the decade" in the 1870s. I easily located a copy of the disastrous Ah, Sin! at the university library. However, The Gilded Age could not be found anywhere.

Some nine or ten years later, while I was on the faculty at Arizona State University, I was able to locate two extant copies of the play, which was actually called Colonel Sellers. One was a handwritten manuscript of Twain's and the other was a typed production script. WOW! I had discovered a lost major work by one of the greatest American authors. Surely this deserved to be in print. I verified my work with Robert Hirst of the Mark Twain Project at the University of California, Berkeley. He agreed this work should be made available to the general Twain fan. Like Colonel Sellers itself, my work was bound for oblivion. Being a play script, the humanities people said I should contact publishers interested in the arts. Being a work of Mark Twain, the arts people said I should be talking with the humanities and literature people. A literary reviewer for a major newspaper praised the introduction for being "not only good scholarship, but a surprisingly entertaining read." An outside reviewer for a university press that was going to publish the work said "something this entertaining should not be published by a university." Discouraged, I chucked the whole thing into the drawer and gave up.

A year or two later I get a phone call. It's a doctoral student from the University of Missouri by the name of Jerry Thomason. His dissertation concerned Colonel Sellers. Jerry had read and clipped the newspaper article about Sellers. When his graduate assistant's office burnt down, this article was one of only two things he saved. I had never revealed where I found the manuscripts of Colonel Sellers - that was to be revealed upon publication. All the scholars said no manuscripts remained, Jerry said. He really needed my work. Would I send him copies? I told him the manuscripts did exist and, while I wouldn't send him my research, he was welcome to come to Arizona, review the material and copy what he needed. Needless to say, he drove to Phoenix at the first opportunity. In return, I asked to be credited for my research and to receive a copy of the final dissertaion. Jerry expanded greatly my research, found a third manuscript version of the play (Densmore's?), got his doctorate and, the last I heard, is on the theater faculty of Hannibal-Lagrange college. He published a version of the script in a Twain scholarly journal and produced the first known production of the play in more than 100 years at the college. Jerry never did send me a copy of his dissertation and I am not sure I was credited with the basic research and the uncovering of the manuscripts.

Sadly, neither he nor I have succeeded in getting the play published for general consumptio—even with the help of a very good agent who represented us jointly in one last attempt. However, my section on Twain's encounter with the Australian actor, Willie Gill, was published in William B. Gill: From the Gold Fields to Broadway by Kurt Gänzl.

Well, thanks to the wonders of the World Wide Web, I am able to share my work with the general Twain fan. To the best of my knowledge, this is the only place you can read this lost masterpiece, short of digging up Jerry's dissertaion, or finding an old copy of the journal in which Jerry published the manuscript.

Enjoy!

KB Shaw