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...
Category: The Study
“The Texan Steer”: A Rediscovered Sketch by Mark Twain?
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...
The Nastiest Things Mark Twain Said About Teddy Roosevelt
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...
“The Greatest Showman” vs. “The World’s Greatest Laughmaker”
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,...
The Calculated Incivility of Anson Burlingame, The Only Congressman Mark Twain Could Tolerate
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...
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: Not Just for English Majors
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...
StagecoachLife: 150 Years of Mark Twain’s Roughing It
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...
Put The Reader Through Hell: In Memory of Toni Morrison, Twain Scholar
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...
On April 21st, Easter Sunday…
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...
Neoliberal Rationality in The Old Gilded Age: Introductory Address at 2018 Quarry Farm Symposium
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...









