"A Thoreauvian at Quarry Farm" (A Quarry Farm Testimonial) EDITOR’S NOTE: We occasionally feature testimonials from recent Quarry Farm Fellows and Residents, which combine conversational illustrations of their research and writing process with personal reflections on...
Steve Jordan, master historic preservantionist and window restoration expert, has worked out a number of projects at Quarry Farm and the Mark Twain Study. He restored the windows in the Quarry Farm parlor, the windows in the Mark Twain Study, and has worked on the...
For the ninth year the Center for Mark Twain Studies has sponsored the "Portraying Mark Twain" art competition for all Elmira College students. Four final images were selected from fifty-two submissions that represented Mark Twain, his literature, or aspects of his...
Originally posted by: Matt Seybold on February 12, 2019On August 27, 1870, a sketch appeared in the Leavenworth Daily Commercial with Mark Twain’s byline. So far as I can tell, this sketch, “The Texan Steer,” has never appeared in any collection of Twain’s work or...
Originally posted by: Matt Seybold on August 31st, 2017Yesterday, Los Angeles Review of Books published a piece I’ve been working on intermittently since the Amazon-Whole Foods merger was announced in mid-June. Please check it out.One of the implicit theses of the...
Originally posted by: Matt Seybold on December 19, 2017The Greatest Showman, a film about one of Mark Twain’s contemporaries and kindred spirits, releases nationwide tomorrow. Twain and P. T. Barnum were, by various accounts, friends, acquaintances, mutual admirers,...
Originally posted by: Matt Seybold on July 8, 2018 “His outlook upon the world and its affairs was as wide as the horizon, and his speech was of a dignity and eloquence proper to it. He dealt in no commonplaces, for he had not commonplace thoughts. He was a kindly...
Originally posted by: Matt Seybold on January 13, 2017 Annotated editions of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn have been relatively rare, especially considering how frequently the novel is taught in courses at both the secondary and collegiate level. The ever-popular...
Originally posted by: Matt Seybold on February 28, 202 Sometimes we labor under the delusion that by actively cultivating tastes for specific flavors of mortal risk, social isolation, physical pain, and other varietals of suffering we might transcend the oppressive...
Originally posted by: Matt Seybold on August 6, 2019 Toni Morrison died today. It addition to being one of the most renowned writers of the past century, Morrison was an incisive critic and passionate reader of Mark Twain’s works. The Twain Studies community of...