The 2024 Trouble Begins Lecture Series and Park Church Summer Lecture Series are made possible by the generous support of The Mark Twain Foundation.
Wednesday, October 9 at The Quarry Farm Barn
“Mining Gilt”
Kathryn Dolan, Missouri University of Science and Technology
The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873), by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, is a satirical novel involving greed, corruption, and social issues of the post-Civil Era United States. Both primary family stories in the novel involve the questionable use of natural resources, specifically in terms of speculation and mining. The Hawkins family, with the help of Colonel Sellers, spends the novel overvaluing a piece of Tennessee land, the “Knobs of East Tennessee,” in the hopes of commercializing on its imagined variety of natural resources. Meanwhile, Philip Sterling almost destroys himself searching for coal in a Pennsylvania mine, looking for wealth in a manner that costs his friends and sponsors, the Bolton family, their country home that had been replete with “rare trees and flowers” as well as “garden and lawn and conservatories” (449). In both cases, Twain and Warner shine a light on the blind greed that runs throughout the novel, what they term the “beautiful demon of Money” (447). Mark Twain has been connected to the most controversial issues of his time and beyond, such as racism, women’s rights, imperialism, and even animal welfare. His writing partner, Charles Dudley Warner, was an editor best known for his nonfiction, such as My Summer in a Garden (1870). Together, Twain and Warner are effective at ironically describing and criticizing the exploitation of land witnessed during their time, specifically through mining in much the same way as they do with corrupt politicians. In so doing, they predict the significance of coal that lasts into modern times in much the same way that they predicted the era now referred to as the Gilded Age.
Kathryn Dolan is Associate Professor of Nineteenth-Century American Literature at Missouri University of Science and Technology. Her research focuses on sustainability, food studies, and globalization. She teaches courses on American Romanticism, American Gothic literature, and U.S. short story. In 2015, she taught on Mark Twain in London for a Missouri exchange program. She has published on nineteenth-century expansion and culture in Beyond the Fruited Plain: Food and Agriculture in U.S. Literature, 1850-1905 (2014) and Cattle Country: Livestock in the Cultural Imagination (2021). Her most recent book, Breakfast Cereal: A Global History (2023), examines the cultural history of breakfast cereal, and has been translated into Chinese, Arabic, and Japanese. Her current project, Imagining Tomorrow’s Bread, studies sustainability in descriptions of food in futuristic texts.
Wednesday, October 16 at The Quarry Farm Barn
“Mark Twain, the Novel, and 1492”
Timothy Donahue, Oakland University
What if we considered Mark Twain not just as a novelist but also as a novel theorist—that is, as an intellectual aiming to account for the novel-genre’s historical origins and its aesthetic and political prospects? My talk pursues this line of inquiry through a reading of Twain’s No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger (c. 1908).
Critics have paid relatively little attention to the near-simultaneity of that novel’s 1490 setting and Columbus’ voyage across the Atlantic. Yet No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger is quite interested in the world-historical transformations that followed from the European arrival in the Americas. In fact, through the miraculous travels of No. 44 across oceans and centuries, the novel traces the spatiotemporal contours of Americanity, Aníbal Quijano and Immanuel Wallerstein’s term for the global colonial modernity that took shape following 1492. Twain suggests that the emergence of this colonial modernity prompts the appearance of the novel-genre. He thus offers a heterodox account of the novel-genre’s history.
As Twain offers this alternative origin story, he also endeavors to create a democratic novelistic form, as a counterpoint to colonial modernity’s hierarchies of race and geography. To do so, he uncouples novelistic form from the secularism critics have associated with the genre at least since the publication of Georg Lukács’ Theory of the Novel (1916). The novel is the “epic of the world abandoned by God,” as Lukács famously put it, because it aims “to uncover and construct the totality of life.” Recent work in post-secular studies has brought into focus how such a secularist urge to uncover, debunk, and demystify amounts to an often-aggressive aspiration to intellectual mastery, and on that basis scholars in post-secular studies have framed secularism as a Eurocentric cultural formation buttressing the uneven development of the post-1492 world. As Ashley Squires has lately noted, Twain offers a comparably critical assessment of secularism in his book Christian Science (1907). Twain’s skepticism regarding secularism is likewise visible in No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger, especially in its scenes of what I term incomplete secularization—moments when characters’ efforts at enlightenment and demystification falter. Through such scenes, Twain’s novel challenges a key cultural pattern of colonial modernity.If the novel-genre is not to be an engine of secularist demystification, what might then be its office? Twain offers an intriguing answer on the pages of No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger and another late speculative fiction, 3,000 Years among the Microbes (c. 1905), both which are framed as translations. Twain’s translational framing suggests that the novel-genre might be thought of as a vehicle for carrying meaning across differences in space, time, culture, and language. This notion of the novel-genre-as-translation, I suggest, is Twain’s effort to imagine how novelistic form could be democratic within our colonial modernity.
Timothy Donahue is Associate Professor of English at Oakland University, where he teaches and researches the literatures of the U.S. and the Americas, with a focus on the nineteenth century. His writing has appeared in American Literary History, Novel, and J19, as well as in the collections The Oxford Handbook of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Apocalypse in American Literature and Culture. He is currently finishing a book on aesthetics, translation, and political sovereignty in North America’s nineteenth-century borderlands, and beginning a second project on Reconstruction’s hemispheric dimensions.
Wednesday, October 23 at The Quarry Farm Barn
“Before There Was Twain There Was Whitcher”
Linda A. Morris, University of California, Davis
When Frances Miriam Whitcher came to live in Elmira in 1847 as the wife of the newly appointed minister of Trinity Episcopal Church, she was already publishing her “Widow Bedott” satiric sketches under a pseudonym. She continued to publish articles anonymously while living in Elmira, stimulated anew by activities in the town, and creating a new first-person literary persona to report on intimate details of the local sewing society associated with their church. Her Elmira-based satires were widely popular at that time in Godey’s Lady’s Book, and they hit home in towns all over the region. In this talk I will examine the targets of her humor both in terms of the people who appeared in her sketches and also in terms of the changing social circumstances behind them. In particular Whitcher targeted what she saw as pretensions to gentility in the community, although Elmira was never mentioned in the sketches. I’ll look at selections from the published sketches themselves as well as passages from letters Whitcher wrote about the actual events that inspired them.
Although Miriam Whitcher lived in Elmira several decades before Samuel Clemens began his long affiliation with the town and Quarry Farm, he was clearly familiar with her work. I will review briefly what he admired about her humor and how it might be seen as influencing his own. Mostly, however, I will explore details of her writing during her Elmira period and the uproar it created when people began to recognize each other in her sketches, ultimately causing her husband to resign as the pastor of his church. I will end the talk by briefly recapping the remarkable success of her humor well into the late nineteenth century, long after her untimely death at the age of 40.
Linda A. Morris is Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Department of English, University of California, Davis. Her book-length studies include Women’s Humor in The Age of Gentility: The Life and Works of Frances Miriam Whitcher; American Women Humorists: Critical Essays (Ed.); and Gender Play in Mark Twain: Cross-Dressing and Transgression. She has published a number of essays about Mark Twain, including “What is Personal about Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc;?” “The Sources of Mark Twain’s Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc” (with Ronald Jenn); “Gender Bending as Child’s Play;” “Identity Switching in Huckleberry Finn;” “Twice Told Tales: Aunt Sally Phelps and the “Evasion” in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn;” “The Eloquent Silence in ‘Hellfire Hotchkiss;’” “Becky Thatcher and Aunt Polly in Three Dimensions;” and “Susy Clemens: The Final Years.” Her essays on American women’s humor include “Good Food, Great Friends, Cold Beer: The Domestic Humor of Mary Lasswell;” “Domestic Manners of the Americans: A Transatlantic Phenomenon;” and “Roz Chast: From Whimsey to Transgression.” She was the recipient of “The Charlie Award” by the American Humor Studies Association, and “The Olivia Langdon Clemens Award” by the Mark Twain Circle of America.
PAST 2024 LECTURES
Wednesday, May 1 at The Quarry Farm Barn
“Mark Twain: Social Satirist”
Gary Scharnhorst, University of New Mexico
(v.42, 1903)
Though often described as a humorist, Mark Twain was much more than a jokesmith, especially late in his career. He may more accurately be described as a social satirist, particularly on issues such as race, religion, free speech and censorship, aristocracy, imperialism, colonial oppression, and political corruption. During his career he was both celebrated and denounced for his activism and his public comments on controversial topics, as illustrated in caricatures and editorial cartoons published at the time, though at his death he was mostly remembered for his patriotism and progressivism.
Gary Scharnhorst is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at the University of New Mexico and editor of the journal American Literary Realism. He is the former president of the Western Literature Association and former chair of the American Literature Section of the Modern Language Association. He is also the author of over a hundred scholarly articles and author or editor of over sixty books, including Mark Twain: The Complete Interviews (University of Alabama Press) and the three-volume Life of Mark Twain (University of Missouri Press).
View Gary Scharnhorst’s lecture HERE.
Wednesday, May 8 at The Quarry Farm Barn
“Genealogies of Mothering and Mammying in Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson”
Brigitte Fielder, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Roxy, the mixed-race Black mother of Pudd’nhead Wilson, changes her child’s place with the child of her enslaver. She achieves this swap by performing the roles of mother and mammy, respectively, projecting race onto each child by virtue of their racialized relationships to her. Representations of the mother (overwhelmingly imagined as white in white-authored literature) and the racist minstrel trope of the mammy (overwhelmingly overshadowing Black motherhood in white-authored literature) converge in Twain’s novel. This reveals their co-construction: the mammy’s surrogacy is dependent upon her own mother-relation, even as this relation is impeded by the legal mechanisms of slavery. Twain’s novel hereby illustrates how race is not simply constructed within individual bodies or identities but via racialized relationships.
Brigitte Fielder is an Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the author of Relative Races: Genealogies of Interracial Kinship in Nineteenth-Century America (2020) and co-author (with Jonathan Senchyne) of Against a Sharp White Background: Infrastructures of African American Print (2019). Her essays have appeared in journals including African American Review, American Literary History, American Quarterly, Civil War History, J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers, The Lion and Unicorn, Research on Diversity in Youth Literature, TSWL: Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, and various edited collections.
View Brigitte Fielder’s lecture HERE.
Wednesday, May 15 at The Quarry Farm Barn
“The Mixed-Race Fiction of Charles Chesnutt and Mark Twain”
Rafael Walker, Baruch College, City University of New York
In the 1890s—the decade that yielded the Plessy decision allowing segregation in the U.S.—Charles Waddell Chesnutt and Mark Twain wrote fiction demonstrating the arbitrariness of race, at a time when many of their compatriots were insisting on its primacy. Interestingly, both sought to subvert racial and racist thinking through writing stories about mixed-race people, a demographic straddling the deepening color line that W.E.B. Du Bois would designate a decade later as the “problem of the twentieth century.” Obviously, for these two writers, the stakes were different: Mark Twain was trying to be a good citizen while Chesnutt (a man fair enough to pass for white but who let himself be identified as black) was fighting for his life and the lives of others like him. Despite these differences, however, Mark Twain, along with Chesnutt, is now counted among the first to have moved beyond propaganda in portraying mixed-race characters. And yet his most-sustained attempt at rendering such lives, his 1894 novel Puddn’head Wilson, has remained among his least-liked works. In this lecture, I bring this novel into conversation with Chesnutt’s own oft-maligned novel about mixed-race siblings, The House behind the Cedars (1900), to suggest that the disorderliness of both their works is less the result of carelessness than the product of the disorderliness of their subject matter—race in an era convinced that the concept mattered yet couldn’t even consistently define it.
Rafael Walker is Assistant Professor of English at Baruch College, City University of New York, where he is also affiliate faculty in both the Department of Black and Latino Studies and in the Program and Women and Gender Studies. He has published on many topics both in American literature and in higher education, his work appearing in varied venues, such as MELUS, Arizona Quarterly, J19, Twentieth-Century Literature, and The Chronicle of Higher Education, to name a few. He has put together a critical edition of Kate Chopin’s work, The Awakening and Other Stories (published with Warbler Press Classics) and a new edition of Nella Larsen’s Passing for Broadview Press. Walker is working on two book-length monographs—one on the American realist novel and the other on biraciality in American culture. He also has served on the editorial board for J19: The Journal for the Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists.
View Rafael Walker’s lecture HERE.
Wednesday, May 22 at The Quarry Farm Barn
“Mark Twain’s 70th at Delmonico’s: The Dawn of a New Era in American Literature”
Tess Chakkalakal, Bowdoin College
On Tuesday December 5th, 1905, the nation’s most revered and well-known writers from across the United States gathered in New York City to honor Mark Twain’s seventieth birthday. While Twain was the gathering’s undisputed center, the occasion featured several other writers, old and young, whose presence marked a new turn in American literature. The party included several women writers and, for perhaps the first time in the nation’s history, a Black and Native American author sat alongside their white counterparts. A close look at this event, the toasts, the menus, the clothes, and gossip gives us a view of Twain’s lasting influence on American Literature.
Tess Chakkalakal is the author A Matter of Complexion: The Life and Fiction of Charles W. Chesnutt (forthcoming, St. Martin’s) and Novel Bondage: Slavery, Marriage, and Freedom in Nineteenth-Century America (U of Illinois Press, 2011). She is co-editor, with Kenneth W. Warren, of a new edition of Imperium in Imperio: A Critical Edition (West Virginia University Press, 2022) and Jim Crow, Literature, and the Legacy of Sutton E. Griggs (University of Georgia Press, 2013). She is creator and co-host of a new podcast called “Dead Writers: Great American Authors and Where They Lived.” She teaches African American and American Literature at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine.
Watch Tess Chakkalakal’s lecture HERE.
Wednesday, May 29 at The Quarry Farm Barn (7:00pm)
“Mark Twain’s Caste Studies in Following the Equator”
Susan Gillman, University of California, Santa Cruz
(Chapter XLI, p.382)
Comparisons between the US and India have often fueled caste studies today, and Mark Twain’s quasi-satirical, orientalist travel narrative, Following the Equator (1897) offers an unexpected late-nineteenth-century US literary example of comparative caste thinking. Here, on the “hot belt of the equator,” Twain compares the injustices of the caste system in India, which he sees dramatized before him, especially vividly in a Bombay hotel, to his memories of his boyhood in the US south. India, “the mother and home of that wonder of wonders—caste,” thus becomes a conduit to the racial divisions of Mark Twain’s America—to resonate in the twenty-first century and beyond.
Susan Gillman is Distinguished Professor of Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She teaches 19th-century US literature and World Literature and Cultural Studies, and works on national literatures and cultures from a hemispheric perspective. She is the author of Dark Twins: Imposture and Identity in Mark Twain’s America (1989) and Blood Talk: American Race Melodrama and the Culture of the Occult (2003), honored by the MLA. She has worked collaboratively on several essay collections, most recently with co-editor Christopher Castiglia on Neither the Time nor the Place: Today’s Nineteenth Century (U. of Pennsylvania Press, 2022). Her new book, American Mediterraneans (U. of Chicago Press, 2022) traces the strange career of the “American Mediterranean,” a scholarly metaphor and folk geographical concept used from 1799 to the present in multiple disciplines, genres and languages, as a point of departure for a transnational and translational study of the Americas.
Watch Susan Gillman’s lecture HERE.
Wednesday July 10 at The Park Church
“Langdon’s Pencil: The Infant Voice in Mark Twain’s Letters”
Charline Jao, Cornell University
Between November 7, 1870 and June 2, 1872, Samuel and Olivia Clemens’s letters became absorbed with reports on the condition of their firstborn son Langdon, whose premature birth and constant sickness filled both parents with constant anxiety. The couple’s worry would eventually prove true, as Langdon died of diathermia at nineteen-months old – a death made even more tragic for the Clemens’s inability to travel to Elmira for Langdon’s burial. Following Barbara E. Snedecor’s work on this period, Joseph Csicsila points out that Langdon has often been a “curious gap” in Twain scholarship, especially when the deaths of Clemens’s brother Henry, his daughters, and his wife have been given a comparatively large amount of critical attention. Clemens’s struggle with Langdon’s uncertain health over this two-year period oscillates between hope, happiness, and anxiety. These feelings are especially prominent in the handful of letters where, curiously, Clemens ventriloquizes his son in written correspondences to friends and family. These invented scenes of infant writing and speech comically undermine the etymology of infant – the enfans which literally means “without speech.” The tone of these messages ranges from informative (“At birth I only weighed 4 ½ pounds with my clothes on—&; the clothes were the chief feature of the weight, too, I am obliged to confess”), silly (“I am as red as a lobster”), and defiant (“I do not wish to have any words with you, old man, father”). Narrative and the imitation of infant “language” function as literary and social experiments in these letters. Thus, Clemens’s first experience with parenthood provide a less-explored archive and insights into studies of Twain and childhood.
Charline Jao is a PhD candidate in the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell University. Her dissertation “Early Lost” examines scenes of child death and separation in nineteenth-century American women’s writing. She is the creator of two digital humanities projects: Periodical Poets, which examines poetry in nineteenth-century Black-edited periodicals, and No Stain of Tears and Blood, which compiles material from the free produce movement. She was previously a Brown Family Collection Short Term Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society and a Trouble Begins lecturer at Quarry Farm. Her work has been published in American Periodicals and the Cornell Rural Humanities Pamphlet Collection.
Watch Charline Jao’s lecture HERE.
Wednesday, July 17 at The Park Church
“‘Making of a Woman Minister’: Rev. Annis Ford Eastman and Elmira, New York”
Mary Lemak, University at Albany
This talk explores the life and career of one of the United States’ first female ministers, the Reverend Annis Ford Eastman (1852-1910). Mostly remembered today as the author of Mark Twain’s eulogy and as the mother of two famous children: Max Eastman, famous author and liberal activist, and Crystal Eastman, co-founder of the American Civil Liberties Union. R, Annis Eastman, however, had a career that was exceptional in its own right. Eastman was ordained when it was practically unheard of for a woman to preach. Not only did she become a minister but she was invited to speak at national conferences and was frequently published in religious and civic journals. Despite her skills as an orator, author, and theologian, her career was actualized, in part, because of her relationship with her husband, Reverend Samuel Eastman. A further contributing factor to her ordination was the unique religious and social environment of Upstate New York during the second half of the nineteenth century. The Eastmans moved around New York’s Burned-Over District before settling down in Elmira, New York. While the Burned-Over District had a rightful reputation for militant progressivism, Elmira was almost unique in its political and socioeconomic situation. Elmira at this time was a hotbed for radical religious and political thought under the control of a politically progressive railroad tycoon, Jervis Langdon, the father-in-law of Mark Twain. Annis Eastman’s career reached its peak in the 1890s as the United States transitioned between the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era. Her position as a woman minister and the politics that she espoused given her platform are emblematic of that shift.
Mary Lemak recently graduated from the University at Albany’s undergraduate history program. Her honors thesis “‘Making of a Woman Minister’” focused on the Reverend Annis Ford Eastman and her tenure at the Park Church. She is an Elmira native and worked for the Elmira College Center for Mark Twain Studies from 2018 to 2023. In the Fall 2024, she will attend the University at Buffalo School of Law.
Watch Mary Lemak’s lecture HERE.
Wednesday, July 24 at The Park Church
“The Cosmic Mark Twain”
Edward Guimont, Bristol Community College
Mark Twain was born on 30 November 1835, only a few weeks after the appearance of Halley’s Comet. Throughout his life he believed he was destined to die when the comet next returned. His prediction was born out, as he died at his Stormfield, Connecticut residence on 21 April 1910, a day after Halley’s closest approach. Twain named his mansion after the last story published in his lifetime, “Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven,” in which comets are depicted as the spirits of the dead. In between, comets prominently feature in two of Twain’s less well-known stories, “A Curious Pleasure Excursion” (1874) and “A Letter from the Comet” (c. 1880s).
Twain was far from the only author interested in comets during his lifetime. In 1877, Jules Verne wrote Off on a Comet (with several parallels to “A Curious Pleasure Excursion”), in which several people are swept up onto the fictional comet Gallia; this has been identified as the “first vision of a human community surviving in a small, self-sustaining Earth-like environment far from the Earth itself.” In 1883, Ignatius L. Donnelly published the ostensibly-nonfiction Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel, where he proposed that a comet impact had destroyed Atlantis and caused mass extinction. While a direct influence on modern conspiracy theorist Graham Hancock, Donnelly’s proposal also anticipated the 1980 Alvarez hypothesis of cometary dinosaur extinction. Twain himself died in the midst of a mass panic caused by the Earth’s passage through the tail of Halley’s Comet. Thousands believed traces of cyanogen detected in its gasses would kill all life on Earth, with some committing suicide as a result, anticipating the Heaven’s Gate cult’s response to the Hale-Bopp comet at the century’s close.
During Twain’s lifetime, therefore, writing about comets originated modern scientific notions of celestial mass extinction and space colonization, as well as modern pseudoscientific notions of imminent apocalypse and ancient fallen super-civilizations, developments which the well-read Twain was familiar with, and in some cases contributed to. “The Cosmic Mark Twain” will explore those issues, along with other space-related concepts that Twain was interested in—such as the search for a ninth planet beyond Pluto—and ideas that were popular during his lifetime with resonance for the present, such early UFO sightings.
Edward Guimont received his PhD in history from the University of Connecticut, and is currently Associate Professor of World History at Bristol Community College in Fall River, Massachusetts. His first monograph, When the Stars Are Right: H. P. Lovecraft and Astronomy (coauthored with Horace A. Smith) was published by Hippocampus Press in 2023; he is working on his second book, The Power of the Flat Earth Idea, for Palgrave Macmillan. He participated in the 2023 Quarry Farm Symposium and is a 2024 Quarry Farm Fellow, researching Twain’s interest in astronomy for a forthcoming publication. His work has appeared in Contingent Magazine, The Lovecraft Annual, Quest: The History of Spaceflight, and Interdisciplinary Science Reviews.
Watch Edward Guimont’s lecture HERE.
Wednesday, July 31 at The Park Church
“‘the dearest little woman in the world’: Letters of Olivia Clemens to her Sister, Susan Crane”
Barbara Snedecor, Former Director of the Center for Mark Twain Studies
While Susan Crane’s relationship with her famous brother-in-law, Samuel Langhorne Clemens, is known, exploring the bond between Olivia and her older sister creates a new perspective. Drawing from Olivia’s letters to Susan, we experience her emotions as a parent of four children, enjoy descriptions of summers at Quarry Farm and of family travels, and view glimpses of her intimate thoughts. Selected excerpts illuminate the warm relationship between the two sisters, both members of Elmira’s Park Church, and reveal Olivia’s feelings at ordinary and defining moments in the Clemens family biography.
Barbara E. Snedecor served as director of the Center for Mark Twain Studies and as Assistant Professor of American Literature at Elmira College. In addition to editing the second edition of Mark Twain in Elmira, she has contributed pieces to the Mark Twain Annual and American Literary Realism. She is the editor of Gravity: Selected Letters of Olivia Langdon Clemens (University of Missouri Press, 2023).
Courtesy of the Mark Twain Archives, Elmira College.
Courtesy of the Mark Twain Archive, Elmira College.
Watch Barbara Snedecor’s lecture HERE.
Wednesday, October 2 at The Quarry Farm Barn
“Authority and Corruption: Editing the California Pudd’nhead Wilson“
Benjamin Griffin, The Mark Twain Project of The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley
In this illustrated talk I discuss the preparation of the new edition of Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson, published this year by the University of California Press. The outstanding feature of the edition is that it contains three texts: the text of the Morgan Manuscript, which is the first-completed version, which has never before been published in full. Then follows an edited text of the published (1894) version, thoroughly reconstructed to eliminate the depredations of the Century Magazine; and Those Extraordinary Twins, Clemens’s exhibition of bits of the original version, reworked to form a not very satisfactory magazine article. Editorial work can be daunting but this talk shows it is far from pointless. Examination of the original materials has worked very dramatic changes in the text, and opened many new avenues of interpretation. New light, that is to say, on the central problem of Clemens’s shifting intentions as he overhauled his tale — and on the practices of the editors and printers who labored to tame the text.
Benjamin Griffin is Associate Editor at the Mark Twain Project of The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, where since 1967 a team of editors has been creating a scholarly edition of Mark Twain’s works. Ben’s editorial credits in that series include the three volumes of Mark Twain’s Autobiography; A Family Sketch and Other Private Writings; Mark Twain’s Civil War; and the three-text edition of Pudd’nhead Wilson. During his twenty years at the Project he has published in many scholarly journals, and taught an undergraduate seminar in Mark Twain and textual criticism.
Watch Benjamin Griffin’s lecture HERE.
The Barn at Quarry Farm
The Barn at Quarry Farm has been repurposed as a lecture venue. This was made possible from a generous preservation grant from the Jon Ben Snow Memorial Trust.
Attendees can park on Crane Road or on the grassy area behind the Barn. Quarry Farm is a fragile, natural environment. Please exercise care. If using a GPS, enter 131 Crane Road, Elmira, New York
Peterson Chapel in Cowles Hall
Elmira College Campus
Lectures may also be held in Peterson Chapel in Elmira College’s Cowles Hall. The chapel features a series of stained glass windows depicted the history and traditions of the college, including one of Twain in front of his study and one of his wife, Elmira College alumnus Olivia Clemens, on front of the porch at Quarry Farm. There is also a Mark Twain Exhibit in Cowles Hall.
The address of Elmira College is 1 Park Place, Elmira, NY 14901. Cowles Hall is on the east side of Park Place, behind the Fasset Commons Art building on Washington Avenue. In front of Cowles Hall is a small man-made pond known as “The Puddle” and the Mark Twain Study. Public parking may be found off of North Main Street, at the north east corner of campus.
The Park Church
Founded in 1846 by a group of abolitionists, including Jervis Langdon, Mark Twain’s father-in-law, The Park Church has been a strong presence in Elmira’s history. Some of its congregation were close friends and family members to Mark Twain, including Susan Crane, who donated flowers from Quarry Farm every Sunday. Known for its striking architectural features, The Park Church contained Elmira’s first public library and has a long history of charitable service to the Elmira community. Thomas K. Beecher, brother to Harriet Beecher Stowe and friend of Mark Twain, was the first minister at the Park Church and presided over its construction. Before its demolition in 1939, the Langdon Mansion was located directly across from the Park Church.
The Park Church is located at 208 West Gray Street, Elmira, New York.