The Center for Mark Twain Studies (CMTS) at Elmira College held its second lecture in 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 the remaining lectures will be held on May 20 and May 27.
The second lecture is a talk by award-winning author John Jeremiah Sullivan. His 2011 essay collection, Pulphead, was named one of the 100 best books of the 21st century by the New York Times Book Review. He is the recipient of several awards and honors, including the Whiting Award, the Windham-Campbell Prize, two National Magazine Awards, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a fellowship at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.
A year ago, while reviewing a new biography of Mark Twain for Harper’s Magazine, I discovered a fascinating and obscure text that was unaccounted for in the existing scholarship. An obituary-essay written just days after his death, the piece appeared in, of all places, a British military newsletter published in Lahore, Pakistan (then a part of India). The roughly 1,000-word essay is intimate, detailed, moving, eccentric, admiring, and includes multiple unfamiliar anecdotes of Twain’s life and personality, as well as stray glimpses of his wife, daughters, and friends. Equally interesting is the identify of the woman who wrote it: a forgotten American doctor and author (of poems, essays, and short stories) named Adele Gleason, who had grown up in Elmira, New York, at her family’s well-known hydropathic “water cure” sanitarium, where Twain took his baths in the summer and liked to spend time. Like Twain himself, Gleason was highly interested in dreams, and the possibility of telepathic communication via the dream state. She was a passionate person, a world traveler, famed for her beauty and deeply involved all her life in progressive causes. She was also a lesbian who fought to live openly in a repressive society. This lecture will attempt to weave together three threads: Gleason’s life and work, the legacy of her remarkable family and of the institution they built in Elmira, and the uniqueness of her perspective on Twain. What can we learn about “Mr. Clemens” by seeing him through the lens of such a brilliant and unusual mind?
John Jeremiah Sullivan is an award-winning writer in multiple genres who lives with his wife and two daughters in Wilmington, North Carolina. His 2011 essay collection, Pulphead, was named one of the 100 best books of the 21st century by the New York Times Book Review. He is the recipient of several awards and honors, including the Whiting Award, the Windham-Campbell Prize, two National Magazine Awards, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a fellowship at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. His next book, The Prime Minister of Paradise, about a forgotten 18th-century utopian experiment, is forthcoming from Random House. He is a co-founder of the Third Person Project, a non-profit research collective dedicated to uncovering the forgotten Black history of the Cape Fear region.
Additional 2026 Spring Trouble Begins Lectures:
- 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.