CMTS Announces the 2023 Fall Trouble Begins Lineup

All CMTS lectures are open the public at no cost. We hope to see you at the talks!

Final Episode of Inaugural Season of The American Vandal Podcast Features Reading & Discussion of Mark Twain’s “Letter From Santa Claus”

In homage to the season, we dedicate an episode to Mark Twain’s 1875 letter to his daughter, in which he impersonates the “jolly old elf.”

Thanksgiving Steeple-Jumping: The Sesquicentennial of Mark Twain’s “Conditional” Engagement

On Thanksgiving Day, 1868, Olivia Langdon “yielded a conditional consent” to Sam Clemens’s third proposal of marriage. They had know each other for less than a year, having been introduced on the occasion of a Charles Dickens reading in New York City the previous New Year’s Eve. Sam had made himself a fixture in Elmira during the Summer and Fall of 1868, going out of his way to visit the Langdons whenever […]

150 Years of Mark Twain in Elmira: Dickens Holidays, The Gospel of Revolt, & The Quarry Farm Style

2018 marks the sesquicentennial anniversary of Mark Twain’s first visit to Elmira, the town where he would meet his wife, spend many of his summers over the remainder of his life, write several of his most acclaimed books, and finally be laid to rest. In the following essay, Dr. Seybold commemorates the occasion by offering his estimation of what Elmira meant to Mark Twain.  January 26, 1905 It was the 30th birthday […]

2018 Park Church Summer Lectures

The 2018 Park Church Summer Lecture Series Previous “Park Church” and “Trouble Begins” lectures can be found and downloaded in the “Trouble Begins” Archives” or by clicking here. Wednesday, June 13 at the Park Church 7 p.m. “Fingerprints and Microbe Time: Mark Twain and Scientific Skepticism” James W. Leonard, The Citadel It is well known that Twain took contemporary social, political, and particularly racial beliefs to task through an incisive […]

A Tragic Spring For Joe Twichell

Saturday, April 21, marked the 108th anniversary of Mark Twain’s passing. For Twain, whose final decade was wracked by overwhelming bereavement, the promise of death’s release was something welcome. By the end of his life, Twain’s sentiments toward life and death were akin to Satan’s musings in Letters From the Earth (1909): Life was not a valuable gift, but death was. Life was a fever-dream made up of joys embittered by […]

“Mark Twain & Libation”: A Talk By The 2017 Louis J. Budd Award Winner

On Saturday, August 5th, the Mark Twain Circle presented the Louis J. Budd Award to Laura Skandera Trombley at the 8th International Conference on the State of Mark Twain Studies, hosted by the Center for Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College. Dr. Trombley is a Professor of English at University of Southern California, as well as former President of Pitzer College and the Huntington Library. She is also author of […]

Livy Clemens & Mark Twain’s Moment of Enlightenment

In 1867, Mark Twain addressed letters to Missouri expressing his disgust at the thought of women’s voting rights. He expressed that women should stick to their “feminine little trifles” that consisted of “babies…and knitting.” Twain speculated that women were not capable of making decisions about politics and should let the “natural bosses do the voting” instead. Twain described women as one might antique furniture: “an ornament to the place that […]