Our good old friend Wikipedia has a full bibliography of Mark Twain's publications, which shows that during the 29 years between his original speech and the letter from Mrs. Hudson, he published 33 books, stories, and essays--that's over one a year. It seems to me that he may have exaggerated both his torment and ostracism over the incident for dramatic effect. That's a lot of stuff to publish; clearly he wasn't upset enough that it prevented him from continuing to pour out the same kind of humorous material as in the miner story for very long. (He alluded in his response to Mrs. Hudson that it had been a constant source of torment for him the entire time.)
I do see the possibility of a very short lapse in publication, whether due to personal mortification or his inability to find a publisher willing to deal with him immediately after the incident. His speech was given very late in the year (December 18), so likely his two publications in 1877 came before. He only had one publication in 1878. I would be interested to know if that was a deal that was already in motion prior to the incident, or if publishers were still willing to enter into new agreements with him immediately after his allegedly offensive story. He didn't publish in 1879 at all, so if the 1877 publication was already in motion prior to December 18, it seems likely that the incident did in fact cause problems for his work.
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Frequently, artistic movements and philosophic movements which occur in roughly the same time period have the same name, but that rarely, if ever, indicates anything beyond the fact that they were occuring contemporaneously. It typically takes roughly 50-100 years for a philosophic movement to influence what is actually occuring in art.
Wikipedia correctly names Kant as the fountainhead of the transcendentalist movement in philosophy (as well as being the coiner of the term "transcendental idealism"), and the timing would be about right for his ideas to have begun to influence art, but it's important to recognize that he was only the very beginning of the transcendalism in philosophy, and in a lot of ways is better classified as a Late Modern Philosopher (the specific problems he was working on were much more aligned with Hume, Berkeley, Locke, et al, than his successors). All of the rest of the transcendental philosophers, which followed him and built off of him, are more aptly represented in early twentieth century writers, and they really come to a head with the post-modernist and existentialist movements in art.
Oops... That was supposed to be a comment on Melissa's post, "Things to Think About."
Further research has shown that the short lapse in publication was not due to personal mortification or to ostracism in the publishing industry, but to a "working holiday." He spent 16 months traveling with his family in Europe and doing research for his book A Tramp Abroad.
I read somewhere about Mark Twain's cocky tone and pessimism that was present in his work, and how his humorous and cockiness diminished in his later years while the pessimism increased. Perhaps, if we knew the trend in his writing style by the time he published his autobioraphy, it might give some insight as to how to interpret it, particularly how cocky or pessimistic he would likely have been then.
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