Originally posted by: Matt Seybold on April 21, 2019Easter Sunday fell on April 21st in 1867. It seems likely that Samuel Clemens observed the holiday largely alone at the Westminster Hotel. He stood on the precipice of lasting fame. His “Jumping Frog” story had been...
Originally posted by: Matt Seybold on October 5, 2018At the outset of his chapter on “The Economics of American Literary Realism” in The Routledge Companion to Literature & Economics (published today, by the way), Henry Wonham asks whether “the diverse set of...
Originally posted by: Matt Seybold on October 28, 2016 In the recently published 2017 issue of Mark Twain Annual, Susan L. Eastman of University of Tennessee – Chattanooga discusses the distinctly contemporary resonances of a short story, “The War Prayer,” which was...
Originally posted by: Matt Seybold on November 21, 2017In 1905, Thanksgiving Day fell on the 30th of November, which also happened to be Sam Clemens’s 70th birthday. In his autobiography, he claims an effort was made “to get the President to select another day for the...
Originally posted by: Matt Seybold on December 30, 2016The above image, courtesy of The Mark Twain Project at UC-Berkeley’s Bancroft Library, comes from an engraved greeting card Twain circulated in January, 1876. William Dean Howells, upon receiving one, described...
Originally posted by: Matt Seybold on December 23, 2017WNPR (Hartford) ran a segment this week about Mark Twain’s “Letter From Santa Claus” featuring an interview with The Mark Twain House‘s Director of Education, James Golden. You can listen to it below:You can...
Originally posted by: Matt Seybold on June 27, 2019 Carl Richard Dolmetsch, Jr. passed away earlier this month. He was 94. Dolmetsch wrote an influential book in Mark Twain Studies, “Our Famous Guest”: Mark Twain in Vienna, which was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize...
Originally posted by: Matt Seybold on November 29, 2017Sam Clemens celebrated his 39th birthday on November 30, 1874 with his wife, Livy, and their two young daughters. Both Sam and Livy’s birthdays fell in close proximity to the Thanksgiving holiday. It was naturally...
Originally posted by: Matt Seybold on February 16th, 2017James Baldwin said surprisingly little about Mark Twain. I say “surprising” because Baldwin was a renowned analyst of U.S. literary history. Many of the contemporaneous writers with whom he associated, both...
Originally posted by: Matt Seybold on August 12th, 2020When Danny Jansen jogged towards home plate on Tuesday night, preparing to registering the first run by a Major League Baseball team headquartered in Buffalo since 1885, he was, unknowingly, treading where Mark...