Joseph Goodman was born in Masonville, New York in 1838. He traveled to California with his father in 1856 and secured employment with Rollin Daggett, typesetting for The Golden Era, a San Francisco literary weekly. Goodman met fellow-printer Denis McCarthy, and the two traveled to Virginia City in 1861, where they acquired interests in the […]
writing
Pair of Wits
Princes of the Fourth Estate Anyone who read the Territorial Enterprise of the early 1860s could have told you which of its two local reporters would go on to face and fortune. Mark Twain? No, Dan De Quille. The long lost Territorial Enterprise was one of the great newspapers on the frontier West. So brilliant […]
Will Wright
Most who knew William Wright, a colleague of Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) on Virginia Cityโs Territorial Enterprise, believed that of the two, Wright was the most likely to succeed. Instead, Twain went on to achieve immediate national and international fame while Wright, nineteenth-century Nevadaโs most important literary figure, slipped into obscurity until recently. Wright was […]