Griffin’s Trouble Begins Lecture Now Available

The public was invited to attend the 2024 Fall Trouble Begins Lecture Series, presented by the Center for Mark Twain Studies and supported by the generous donations of The Mark Twain Foundation. The free lectures began with a presentation by Benjamin Griffin of the Mark Twain Project, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.  

Entitled “Authority and Corruption: Editing the California Pudd’nhead Wilson,” the discussion preempts a new edition of Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson, published by the University of California Press. The new edition contains three texts: the text of the Morgan Manuscript, an edited text of the published version, and Those Extraordinary Twins which includes Clemens’s exhibition of bits of the original version that were reworked to form a not very satisfactory magazine article. Examination of the original materials has opened new avenues of interpretation, particularly about Clemens’s shifting intentions as he overhauled his tale and on the practices of the editors and printers who labored to tame the text.

Griffin is Associate Editor at the Mark Twain Project, which has created a scholarly edition of Mark Twain’s works since 1967. Griffin’s editorial credits in that series include the three volumes of Mark Twain’s AutobiographyA 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.

The 2024 Fall Trouble Begins Lecture Series Schedule. All lectures are free and open to the public. 

  • 7:00 p.m., Wednesday, Oct. 9, at the Barn at Quarry Farm: “Mining Gilt” by Kathryn Dolan, Missouri University of Science and Technology
  • 7:00 p.m., Wednesday, Oct. 16, at the Barn at Quarry Farm: “Mark Twain, the Novel, and 1492” by Timothy Donahue, Oakland University
  • 7:00 p.m., Wednesday, Oct. 23, at the Barn at Quarry Farm: “Before There Was Twain There Was Whitcher” by Linda A. Morris, University of California, Davis 

About The Trouble Begins Lecture Series

In 1984, the Elmira College Center for Mark Twain Studies initiated a lecture series, The Trouble Begins at Eight lecture series. The title came from the handbill advertising Mark Twain’s October 2, 1866 lecture presented at Maguire’s Academy of Music in San Francisco. The first lectures were presented in 1985. By invitation, Mark Twain scholars present lectures in the fall and spring of each year, in the Barn at Quarry Farm or at Peterson Chapel in Cowles Hall on Elmira College’s campus. All lectures are free and open to the public.