Rescued from the archives

One night nearly 140 years ago, Samuel Clemens told his young daughters Clara and Susie a bedtime story about a poor boy who eats a magic flower that gives him the ability to talk to animals.

Storytelling was a nightly ritual in the Clemens home. But something about this particular tale must have stuck with Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, because he decided to jot down some notes about it.

The story might have ended there, lost to history. But decades later, the scholar John Bird was searching the Twain archives at the University of California-Berkeley, when he came across the notes for the story, which Twain titled Oleomargarine. Bird was astonished to find a richly imagined fable, in Twain’s inimitable voice. He and other scholars believe it may be the only written remnant of a children’s fairy tale from Twain, though he told his daughters stories constantly.

It’s impossible to know why Twain did not finish the tale, or if he ever intended it for a wider audience. Now, more than a century after Twain dreamed it up, Oleomargarine has taken on a strange new afterlife.

After consulting a few other scholars, Bird brought the text to the attention of the Mark Twain House and Museum in Hartford, Conn., which sold it to Doubleday Books for Young Readers. This fall, Doubleday will release The Purloining of Prince Oleomargarine, an expanded version of the story that was fleshed out and re-imagined by the children’s book author-andillustrator team of Philip and Erin Stead.

From Twain’s spare urtext, the Steads created a 152-page illustrated story featuring talking animals, giants, dragons, a kidnapped prince and a wicked king. While the original work has a timeless quality, the Steads added a postmodern twist: Twain himself makes an appearance in the book, to argue with the author, Philip Stead, about the direction the story takes.

Finishing a partial manuscript by one of the country’s most revered writers was terrifying at times, the Steads said. “We said yes before our brains could tell us it was a terrible idea and we would never be able to do it,” Stead said in a telephone interview.

Erin Stead, who did the illustrations, said they were very aware of the creative risks involved in taking on the work of such a towering literary figure.

“We both just tried to approach the text respectfully and with as much reverence as possible,” she said. “No one’s qualified to write for Mark Twain.”

Oleomargarine is the latest abandoned children’s tale to resurface decades after a revered writer’s death. In recent years, publishers and estates have dug deep into the archives of beloved children’s book authors in search of partial manuscripts and castoff gems, and have released previously unpublished works by Dr. Seuss, Beatrix Potter and Margaret Wise Brown.

Twain’s story may hold even greater literary significance for scholars and fans, because it represents a new genre for him.