The Center for Mark Twain Studies (CMTS) at Elmira College announced the schedule for the 2026 Spring Trouble Begins Lecture Series, which takes place on Wednesdays throughout May at the historic Barn at Quarry Farm. Located at 131 Crane Road, the lectures are free and open to the public. They begin at 7:00 p.m. and will be held on May 6, May 13, May 20, and May 27.
Kicking off the lecture series is a talk by Ann M. Ryan, Professor of American Literature at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, New York. She is the past president of the Mark Twain Circle, the former editor of The Mark Twain Annual, and co-editor of Cosmopolitan Twain. She is the author of The Ghosts of Mark Twain: A Study of Memory, Masculinity, and Race.
In her presentation titled, “‘You think you’re better’n your father?’: Mark Twain and John Marshall Clemens,” Ryan will explore Twain’s tense, fraught, longing relationship with his father, and how it haunted both his life and his fiction. Although Sam Clemens was only twelve years old when his father died, the adult Mark Twain continued to do battle with his father, breaking and suffering, for the rest of his life. No matter the incarnation—Pap Finn, Judge Driscoll, John Canty, Colonel Grangerford—Twain’s fathers share a number of qualities: they treat children like property; use shame and intimidation to discipline; and if they are not the direct instrument of violence, they are, nonetheless, the source of it. What emerges from the memories of those who knew John Marshall Clemens is a portrait of a dual personality, at once fragile and stern, idealistic and foolish, studied and rash. And while Twain occasionally exposes his father’s temper and satirizes his ambition, he spends a lifetime trying both to rebel against and embody the values of John Marshall Clemens.
Additional 2026 Spring Trouble Begins Lectures:
- 7:00 p.m., Wed., May 13: “‘Mr. Clemens and the Cure: the Rediscovery of a Lost Twain Reminiscence” John Jeremiah Sullivan, Award-Winning Writer
- 7:00 p.m., Wed., May 20: “Seeing Double: Two Poets on their Quarry Farm Stays” Michael Czarnecki and James Plath
- 7:00 p.m., Wed., May 27: “The Politics of Illustrating Children in Twain’s Adaptation Network” Maggie Morris Davis, Illinois State University
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. 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.