Wednesday, October 8 in Gibson Theater, Elmira College (7:00 PM)

Ron Chernow’s Mark Twain Book Tour

Ron Chernow, Pulitzer-Prize Winning Biographer

Mark Twain ranks as America’s most beloved humorist, the largest literary figure this country has produced. Posterity cherishes an image of a mustachioed man in a white suit, dispensing witticisms with a twinkling eye. But far from being a soft-shoe, cracker-barrel philosopher, Twain could be a waspish man of many moods and strong opinions, his wit laced with vinegar. He was funny, charming, and genial but also moody, temperamental, and sometimes explosive.

In short, he was a complex and contradictory man and though he looms large in the public imagination, most of us know very little about him. Now, in his highly anticipated and revelatory new book Mark Twain (Penguin Press; 2025), acclaimed biographer Ron Chernow brilliantly illuminates the the full, fascinating life of the writer long celebrated as the father of American literature.

Ron Chernow is the prizewinning author of seven previous books and the recipient of the 2015 National Humanities Medal. His first book, The House of Morgan, won the National Book Award, Washington: A Life won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography, and Alexander Hamilton—the inspiration for the Broadway musical—won the George Washington Book Prize. He has twice been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and is one of only three living biographers to have won the Gold Medal for Biography of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. A past president of PEN America, Chernow has been the recipient of nine honorary doctorates.

Wednesday, October 15 in the Quarry Farm Barn (7:00 PM)

“A Delicate Balance: Work and Play in Mark Twain’s Creative Process”

Kerry Driscoll, Mark Twain Papers and Project, Universit of California, Berkeley

Although Mark Twain published over twenty books during his lifetime—in addition to countless short stories, sketches, and essays—he nonetheless repeatedly maintained that he was essentially a “lazy” man. Speaking to a New York Times reporter on the cusp of his 70th birthday in 1905, for example, Twain insisted that he “had not done a day’s work in all [his] life,” explaining, “What I have done…was play. If it had been work I shouldn’t have done it.” This talk, featuring archival photographs and manuscripts from the Mark Twain Project, examines the concepts of “work” and “play” in terms of the writer’s creative process and prolific literary output. Specifically, it explores the physical conditions and circumstances Mark Twain found most conducive to the expression of his artistic genius—from his Quarry Farm study in Elmira, NY to a rented room atop a mountain in Heidelberg, Germany, and culminating in the comfort of his elaborately carved Venetian bed.

Wednesday, October 29 in the Quarry Farm Barn (7:00 PM)

“‘I Have Always Preached’: Mark Twain and Liberal Religion”

Dwayne Eutsey, Independent Scholar

“The reports of Mark Twain’s atheism have been greatly exaggerated.” So begins “There is No Humor in Heaven”: Mark Twain and Religious Liberalism, Dwayne Eutsey’s intriguing new book that significantly challenges prevailing assumptions about Twain’s hostility toward religion. Eutsey will present an overview of the book, focusing on religious liberalism’s lifelong influence on Mark Twain’s life and writing. Published by the University of Missouri Press, Eutsey’s book traces the influences of various liberal religious movements of Twain’s era on his writing and religious beliefs, ranging from Freemasonry, Universalism, and Unitarianism to the more genteel liberal Christianity of Elmira and Hartford, and ultimately Free Religion and aspects of esoteric Hinduism.

As a frustrated Gospel preacher himself, Twain’s many friendships with several liberal clergy throughout his life were instrumental in bringing these influences into his life and writing: the “radical evangelical” Franklin Rising in Nevada; Thomas Starr King and other prominent Unitarian ministers in California; Horace Bushnell, Thomas K. Beecher, and Joe Twichell in Elmira and Hartford; and the radical Emerson protege Moncure Conway, whose interest in Hinduism may have influenced Twain’s controversial final novella, No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger.

Wednesday, July 16 at The Park Church

“Beyond Mental Telegraphy: Twain’s late Psychological Fiction”

Thomas W. Howard, Bilkent University (Ankara, Turkey)

What would it mean to read Mark Twain’s late fiction as psychological experimentation? Twain’s fascination with thought-transference, habit formation, and other late nineteenth-century psychological theories has been well studied. Recent scholarship has revealed how Twain incorporates such theories into his fiction—habit formation in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; mental maps in Life on the Mississippi—but I argue that Twain’s later fiction goes further. By transforming psychological theories into narrative experiments, Twain challenges readers’ assumptions about consciousness and identity. Centering Pudd’nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins, I suggest that Twain deploys nineteenth-century ideas of the double brain into his text. Twinned and conjoined characters, for instance, reflect deeper concerns about mental duality and the divided self. The dual structure of the text further complicates any singular narrative, requiring significant effort from the reader to trace multiple suggested paths through the story. I argue that this conjoined text is a twinned story that Twain creates to disrupt linear storytelling, allowing readers to navigate layered and shifting interpretations. Ultimately, I suggest that Twain’s late fiction has a significant place in the emerging field of psychology, revealing how his fictional “experiments”—transforming readers into participants in psychological research—contributes to broader cultural conversations about mental life in the pre-Freudian United States. His late works suggest that literature served (and continues to serve) as an essential laboratory for testing ideas about the mind.

Wednesday, July 9 at The Park Church

“Detecting Twain in Puddn’head Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins”

Aliza Theis, University of California, Berkeley

After the first day of trial in Pudd’nhead Wilson, Tom Driscoll—who thinks he is a white enslaver but was actually born to an enslaved mother—boasts that his crime will “take its place with the permanent mysteries” (329). In a revision, Twain added, “and people won’t get done trying to guess out the secret of it for fifty years” (329). He was right, in the sense that scholars continue to inspect Pudd’nhead Wilson for deeper truths about Mark Twain and his post-Reconstruction mindset. Initially a slapstick story of conjoined twins from Italy traveling in the antebellum South, Pudd’nhead Wilson grew into a detective plot complete with fingerprinting, the doubled crimes of familicide and baby-swapping, and the question of how one reads physical evidence of racial identity. After drastically cutting down the manuscript, Twain decided to publish alongside Pudd’nhead Wilson much of its excised material, which he strung together under the title Those Extraordinary Twins. He justified this double publication with a series of remarks which purport to display his own writing process. However, as he added this self-reflexive content, making his authorship the subject of detection, he also took out his more polemical comments on the construction of whiteness. Drawing from the Mark Twain Project and UC Press’s recent “Authoritative Edition,” this lecture examines the relationship between racial and authorial identity making in the combined works.

Aliza Theis is a PhD student in the English Department at UC Berkeley. Her research focuses on nineteenth-century print culture, landscape, and coloniality. Aliza received a Master’s in Education from Harvard GSE and taught high school English for seven years in Brooklyn and San Francisco. She has presented papers at the National Council of Teachers of English, the Western Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, and she currently serves as a researcher for Samuel Otter.  She is the 2025 Michael J. Kiskis Quarry Farm Fellow.

Wednesday, June 25 at The Park Church (7:00 PM)

“Descent of the Laughing Animal”

Christopher Gilbert, Assumption University

To say that Mark Twain held human beings—as a species—in particularly low regard is to affirm something endemic to the Great Humorist’s sense of humor. To omit mention of Twain’s attention to that which is nonhuman, however, is to risk missing a crucial piece of his comic sensibility: the idea that we humans represent a descent of the laughing animal. Numerous scholars have detailed the ways that Twain articulated his soft spot for nonhuman animals, and that he utilized such animals in his writing as comic foils for the foibles of humanity. But there are compelling bestial elements in what Twain imagines to be the essence of human nature as well as the meaning of laughter in these articulations and uses—elements that should inspire a more robust account of the connections between animality and Twain’s sense of humor. These connections emerge from essays like “What is Man?” and “The Lowest Animal,” from observations in the travelogue, Following the Equator, in short stories like “What Stumped the Bluejays,” and even in works like The Mysterious Stranger and the posthumously published collection Letters From the Earth. What does it suggest, as Twain indeed suggests, that human beings are the only animals that blush? Why might it matter that a bluejay can laugh as we do, and maybe with superior motives? What can be made of a peculiar animality that constitutes Twain’s notion of what we get wrong about humor, by rights? Some answers can be found in a reconceptualization of humans as the most laughable of all the animals, and with it a reimagination of what makes for an animal that laughs. Such a reconceptualization (and reimagination) is at the heart of this lecture.

Wednesday, May 28 at The Quarry Farm Barn

“Mark Twain’s Political Critique of Divine Providence: Joan of Arc and Personal Recollections”

Bernard J. Dobski, Assumption University

Twain’s life-long engagement with institutional religion is well-documented. In two of his last complete novels, Twain sharpens and deepens that engagement; Connecticut Yankee and King Arthur’s Court and Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc explore the question of whether a providential god exists who secures justice in human life. Twain declares that he doesn’t settle that issue in the former book. Does he settle it in the latter, the book he also calls his “best”? I claim that he does: Personal Recollections effectively rules out the possibility of a providential God. The book’s argument against a providential God is grounded in its argument for man’s moral and political nature. And that nature, embodied chiefly in the novel’s narrator, the Sieur Louis de Conte, expressly hopes for a providential divinity that accords with and fulfills our longings for an earthly justice and nobility that would be impossible to fulfill on terms that those categories set for themselves.   

Bernard J. Dobski teaches politics and literature, political philosophy, and international relations at Assumption University in Worcester, MA. He has published widely on ancient Greek political thought, especially Thucydides, the plays and poetry of William Shakespeare, and the political wisdom of Mark Twain. Most recently, he is the author of Mark Twain’s Joan of Arc: Political Wisdom, Divine Justice, and the Origins of Modernity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024). He was a Quarry Farm Fellow in 2023 and is currently at work on a new book on Mark Twain’s engagement with the promise and perils of modernity, with a special focus on the character of its doctrine of individual rights. 

Wednesday, May 21 at The Quarry Farm Barn

“Mark Twain and the ‘Commerce of Disease”

Jess Libow, Haverford College

In Mark Twain’s unfinished 1905 novel, Three Thousand Years Among the Microbes, a scientist “studying micrology under co-founder of the American Society of Microbiology Prof. H[erbert] W[illiam] Conn,” is transformed by a magician into a chlolera germ living on the body of an immigrant “tramp” from Hungary. As Americans were becoming increasingly aware that something undetectable to the human eye could pose a deadly threat, Twain asks what the human body looks like through the eyes of the microbe. Among the Microbes asks us to imagine a human body as “the only world there is” for its microscopic inhabitants. My talk situates Twain’s novel alongside other texts of what Lorenzo Servitje and Kari Nixon have termed “the Bacteriological Age” that emerged at the turn of the twentieth century. I illuminate the class critique embedded in Among the Microbes by reading it alongside texts such as Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives (1890) and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906), both of which depict unhygienic impoverished environments to convey the simultaneously microscopic and immense threat of disease. Throughout Among the Microbes Twain examines microbial labor in relation to that of American workers. For example, the narrator presents the treatment of the lowest class of microbes – called “soiled bread eaters” – in terms reminiscent of the status of American workers. He reports that the stomach in particular is “the richest” and “most fertile” terrain for microbial trade and transportation, and this commercially active stomach echoes the digestive system’s emergence as a key site of disease in Sinclair’s depictions of the diseased meat processed and packaged by immigrant laborers. Ultimately, I argue that the unseen germ of disease in Twain’s manuscript is both a metaphor for and materially tied to another equally ubiquitous public health threat posed by industrial capitalism.

Wednesday, May 14 at the Quarry Farm Barn

Two Talks on the Restoration of the Mark Twain Study

The goal of the restoration of the Mark Twain Study windows was to return them to their original condition, to the degree possible, while respecting and saving the original materials—wood, glass, and hardware. The windows are “slip head” meaning the sashes move up into the wall cavity. Most of the sashes were stuck from careless painting and the sash cords that balanced the sashes were broken. Several broken panes had been replaced with plexiglass. We removed the sashes and boarded up the openings using the HUD do-no-harm method – no fasteners were inserted into the structure. Once in my workshop, we softened the putty and paint in a professional steambox and removed the glass. Any assumed original glass was labeled by location so it could be returned to the original light. The sashes were repaired as necessary, lightly sanded, primed with exterior oil primer, and painted with acrylic-urethane non-blocking paint. Some of the original three-strand twisted cord was still attached to the weights. We purchased a similar twisted hemp cord from a rope manufacturer in California. All of the original hardware remained with the Study but some of it was broken or badly rusted. We cleaned up the rusted pulleys in a chemical bath and painted hardware in a crockpot of boiling water and detergent. There were redundant hardware closures, and the dates when the various pieces were installed is unknown. The sash locks were original but need repairs; we don’t know when the spring pins and slide bolts were installed. We cleaned and reinstalled all of the hardware since photographic and paint layer evidence indicated all of it was early.

Steve Jordan graduated from Memphis State University (BA History) and Cornell University’s graduate program in Historic Preservation. He was the rehab advisor for the Landmark Society of Western New York for six years, an architectural conservator for Bero Architecture for four years, a contributing editor for Old-House Journal from 1998 through 2015, and operated a window restoration business for twenty years. He is the author of several books, including The Window Sash Bible; Storm Windows: A Comprehensive Guide to Wood, Wood Combination, Aluminum, and Interior Storm Windows;  Window Glazing: Puttying and Replacing Glass in Traditional Wood Windows.   Steve travels extensively to teach restoration skills.

As part of the restoration of the Mark Twain Study, an investigation was performed to determine the original finishes used on the building when it was constructed in 1874.  This talk will share the overall findings and methods utilized to uncover the materials and colors used on the interior and exterior building surfaces.  Given that the exterior originally had a “sanded finish” popular in the latter part of the 19th century, the Elmira College faculty and students’ sand research will also be shared.

Alicia Campbell, of Campbell Restoration and Consulting, has been passionately working on historic preservation projects since 1993.  She studied paint analysis at the Frank S. Welsh Co. in the late 1990s and has since performed independent paint analysis work in the Rochester, NY area.  During her 30 year corporate career, she continued her training in the building preservation crafts, and with her husband worked on restoring their five historic properties – receiving the “Historic Home Award” and the “Blood, Sweat, and Tears Award” from the Landmark Society of Western NY.  She is now dedicated to building restoration work full-time.

The Barn in 1925