Professor Susan K. Harris Donates Her “Courtship” Notebooks to the Mark Twain Archive

Posted on by Center for Mark Twain Studies

Editor’s Note: The Mark Twain Archive, administered by the Center for Mark Twain Studies, affords scholars the uniquely rewarding experience of ready access to a collection of primary and secondary materials on Twain as well as the opportunity to live and work in the same home, Quarry Farm, where Twain spent some of his most productive summers in the 1870s and 1880s. In addition to various editions of Twain’s work and an extensive secondary source library dedicate to Mark Twain Studies, the collection includes photographs, books from Twain’s library and the library at Quarry Farm, books and articles written about him, and microfilms of letters and manuscripts from the Mark Twain collections at the Bancroft Library in Berkeley, the Mark Twain Memorial in Hartford, Vassar College and the Huntington Library. Through the generosity of friends over the years, the collection has also acquired a fine collection of Mark Twain titles in languages other than English, the Love Collection of framed photographs and autographs, correspondence between Twain and members of his Elmira circle such as E.M. VanAken, Dr. Frank Darby and Julia Jones Beecher, letters written by Twain at the end of his life and other photographs and memorabilia that add greatly to the scope and interest of the collection.

Some of the most used items in the Mark Twain Archive are research notes from Mark Twain Studies scholars. The Mark Twain Archive contains research notes from John Tuckey, David Fears, and others. If you are interested in exploring the collections in the Mark Twain Archive, you can access the Finding Aids and Digital Collections HERE.

If you are a scholar who is interested in donating your research notes, please contact CMTS Collections Manager Katy Galvin ([email protected]) and/or CMTS Director Joseph Lemak ([email protected])

CMTS is honored to accept the research notebooks of Susan K. Harris. Please find Professor Harris’s description of the materials below.

I rediscovered these notebooks one day when I started tackling the boxes in our basement.  When I hauled them upstairs and began to look through them, I realized that they still contained interesting material, despite the 25 years that have passed since the project was completed.  I am donating the materials to the Center for Mark Twain Studies in the hopes that other scholars can benefit from them.

The notebooks contain the research materials I amassed for The Courtship of Olivia Langdon and Mark Twain, which was published by Cambridge University Press in 1996. One historical note: I was doing the work in the early 1990s, and the notebooks themselves represent a moment in time: material objects, they contain a mix of handwritten (in pencil!) notes taken in specialized archives; printed notes taken on a computer and printed on the kind of printer where you had to tear off perforated margins; and xeroxes of previously published materials.  In other words, the physical notebooks document the transition from written/printed to computerized research methods.

Thematically, the notes represent a swatch of 1850s-1860s Elmira and Langdon families’ histories. There are many pages of transcription (mostly handwritten, in pencil) in the notebooks.  Some, especially Olivia Langdon’s letters, have since been published (see Barbara Snedecor’s Gravity: Selected Letters of Olivia Langdon Clemens, U Missouri Press, 2023).  Others have not, such as Livy’s mother’s notes tracking the renovation of the Langdons’ Elmira mansion.  There is a wonderful letter from a relative describing the seminary students at Oberlin College, and another from Frederick Douglass thanking the Langdons for their hospitality.  There are transcripts of Livy’s Commonplace Book, and letters from Alice Hooker to her mother describing life in the Langdon family in the pre-Sam Clemens days.  Elmira College history also factors in, including curricula and science teaching, as do numerous printed materials from Elmira newspapers and other archival materials.  Overall, it strikes me as a rich trove, with materials that may be useful for researchers from many different fields.

I hope these materials will be helpful to your work.  I ask in return that you acknowledge my notes as one of your sources.  If you are taking one of my ideas and running with it, please acknowledge me.  If you find information here that you fold into your further research, please acknowledge me.  In other words, please treat these notes as you would treat any other archival materials: as a source generated or collected by others, to whose names and work you give credit.  Thank you! 

Susan K. Harris has served on the faculties of the University of Kansas, Penn State, and Queens College, CUNY.  Her specialties are Mark Twain Studies and Studies of American Women Writers. Among her five monographs are Mark Twain’s Escape from Time: A Study of Patterns and Images (U Missouri P, 1982); The Courtship of Olivia Langdon and Mark Twain (Cambridge, 1996); and God’s Arbiters: Americans and the Philippines, 1898-1902 (Oxford, 2011). She has edited three American women’s novels for Penguin/Putnam Press, the Library of America’s volume of Twain’s historical romances, and a Houghton Mifflin pedagogical edition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Her most recent publication, Mark Twain, the World, and Me: “Following the Equator,” Then and Now (U Alabama P, 2020), follows Twain’s last lecture tour as he wound his way through the British Empire in 1895–1896. She is the recipient of the Henry Nash Smith CMTS Award for outstanding service to CMTS and the John S. Tuckey CMTS Award in recognition of lifetime achievements and contributions to Mark Twain Studies.

Professor Harris has given a number of lectures for CMTS. These lectures have been preserved in CMTS’ “Trouble Begins Archives,” including:

  • Susan K. Harris, “Interview about her book, Mark Twain, the World, and Me” (October 21, 2020 – Online)
  • Susan K. Harris, “Searching For The Ornithorhynchus: Mark Twain and Animal Conservation” (October 7, 2015 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Susan K. Harris, “Mark Twain and the Philippine-American War: “Hogwash” and “Pious Hypocrisy” (May 30, 2012 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Susan K. Harris, “Love Texts: The Role of Books in the Courtship of Olivia Langdon and Mark Twain” (November 13, 1996 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Susan K. Harris, “Olivia Langdon Clemens’s Reading” (April 29, 1992 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Susan K. Harris, “Overcoming Sin: The Audiences for Mark Twain’s ‘Hadleyburg’” (July 23, 1990 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Susan K. Harris, “Four Ways to Kill a Mackerel: Mark Twain and Laura Hawkins” (November 3, 1988 – Quarry Farm)