Mark Twian's House

USA Today 4/20/2010
100 years after his death, Mark Twain's work still wields power
By Bob Minzesheimer, USA TODAY

HARTFORD, Conn. — Long before he became a best-selling novelist, Wally Lamb visited Mark Twain's 25-room Gothic Revival mansion here.
Lamb, now 59, was a high school sophomore on a field trip from nearby Norwich. He recalls some of his classmates "were engaged by Twain's home and some were not. I suspect I was the only one who felt the author's presence that day, particularly up in the third-floor billiards room, where he wrote."

A century after his death at 74 on April 21, 1910, in Redding, Conn., Twain continues to attract the kind of attention most living writers can only dream about.

The Mark Twain House & Museum in Hartford, which like Twain himself has a boom-and-bust history, crowns him "America's favorite writer."

Museum director Jeffrey Nichols says that's based on "all the interest we see," including 60,000 visitors a year and the fact that his books, not just TheAdventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but lesser-known works such as What is Man?, remain in print.

"It's a pretty house," Nichols says of the restored, three-story brick structure with ornate woodwork and Tiffany stenciling and glasswork. "But it's the iconic writer who draws people."

At the gift shop in the visitors' center next door, the most popular items aren't jars of wild huckleberry syrup or T-shirts for kids with Twain's subversive quote "Be good and you will be lonesome," but books, new and old, by and about Twain.

His own story is as memorable as those he imagined. Born poor in Missouri in 1835, Samuel Clemens worked as a printer, steamboat captain and prospector before reinventing himself as Mark Twain, lecturer, international travel writer, essayist, novelist, humorist and political commentator.

By current standards, he's no longer a best seller. Since USA TODAY's Best-Selling Books list began in 1993, Twain's masterpiece, Huckleberry Finn, has never been higher than No. 262.

Lamb, author of two Oprah Book Club picks (She's Come Undone and I Know This Much Is True), says, "If Twain were a contestant on the literary equivalent of American Idol, I can't guarantee that he wouldn't be voted off by the public before the big finale." But "he remains America's most influential writer."

Huck Finn's young narrator, "outside of the mainstream, whose dialect tells you where he's from, and who's trying to find his way in a world full of liars and hypocrites," is a prototype for J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye and Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, Lamb says. "Twain certainly has influenced my work. Dolores Price in She's Come Undone is a descendant of Huck."

He remains hugely popular

Twain still is widely read, not just in the USA, but globally, says Shelley Fisher Fishkin, a Stanford professor and author or editor of 33 books on Twain.

"Hundreds of editions of his writings are in print, and new ones are appearing all the time — indeed, new editions of his works are coming out this year in French, German, Japanese and Portuguese."

He's "America's most iconic writer," says Jerome Loving, a Texas A&M professor and author of Mark Twain: The Adventures of Samuel L. Clemens, the latest of more than 20 major biographies.

Twain liked illustrations in his books, but Loving says, "the most memorable icon was the man himself, coifed as he was with that shaggy hair and perennial cigar. He smoked 300 of them a month."

Huck Finn stars a boy willing to "go to hell" for the fugitive slave Jim, "thinking his act of conscience was a criminal act," Loving says. "He applied humor to serious subjects such as slavery, revealing not only its hypocrisy but the absurdity of churchgoing folks to rationalize it."

Huck's frequent use of the n-word — 214 times by one count — has prompted parents and educators to question its use in classrooms and libraries. The American Library Association reports that Huckleberry Finn was the 14th most challenged book in the past decade.

The book's defenders include prominent black writers such as Toni Morrison, who has written that "the cyclical attempts to remove the novel from classrooms extend Jim's captivity on into each generation of readers."

Twain moved to Hartford in 1871 to be near his publisher, and lived here for most of the next 25 years, during which he wrote Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.

Using money his wife inherited, he built a mansion across the lawn from the more modest home of Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin. (It too is a museum.)

Twain's home reflects "the multifaceted complexity of the man and writer," Fishkin says, noting how he had his dining room fireplace built with a divided flue and a window that let him, as she puts it, "bask in the warmth of a raging fire while watching snowflakes fall above it." That image resonates for her: "Underneath the cool, comic surface of work he wrote while he lived there are some pretty searing and fiery criticisms of his society."

It was the family's home until 1896. Twain, his wife and two of his three daughters were in Europe when his eldest daughter, Susy, contracted meningitis and died at home. She was 24. Twain never lived in the house again.

After he sold it in 1903, it became a school, then apartments. It was almost torn down — a local newspaper editor dismissed Twain as a malcontent who merely made fun of everyone — before a group of women saved it in the 1920s. To meet expenses, they leased the first floor to the public library. Restoration began in 1955.

Museum recovers from hard times

In 2003, the addition of a $19 million visitors' center led to a financial crisis for the museum. "Looking back," says Nichols, the director, "it was a bit too big and costly."

Writers, among others, have helped put the museum's budget back in the black, a reminder of Twain's misadventures as a businessman.

On exhibit in the museum is a Paige typesetting machine that Twain invested in heavily. It had 18,000 movable parts; many didn't work. In 1901, after emerging from bankruptcy, Twain advised, "To succeed in business, avoid my example."

On Wednesday, as a fundraiser, the museum will stage a 19th-century séance, which Nichols says will be performed by an illusionist who will "debunk séances and show what trickery was used."

Nichols thinks that would appeal to Twain, "who loved debunking things and had a skeptical interest in spiritualism. But we also know that after his daughter Susy died, he and his wife went to séances. We don't know what happened."

The other two places that employ Twain as a tourist attraction — Elmira, N.Y., his wife's hometown, and Hannibal, Mo., where Twain grew up — also are staging events. Saturday, Elmira will re-enact Twain's burial at Woodlawn Cemetery.

Lamb, who set scenes in Twain's house in his latest novel, The Hour I First Believed, plans his own memorial by "lighting up a cigar, cussing a little and getting a belly laugh or two out of the posturing of our gasbag politicians and commentators. Good Lord, wouldn't Twain have loved the cable news channels?"