A Northwestern University journalism student, professor and 2011 graduate are driving 13,500 miles around the United States between Sept. 18 and Dec. 11 for a project titled “Traveling with Twain in Search of America’s Identity.” The three will follow the path that a young Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) took by stagecoach, steamship and train during trips east to New York, south to New Orleans and west to San Francisco during the 1850s and 1860s; they will interview a variety of Americans about race, immigration-status and other current identity issues and talk with members of a representative American family, the Ghigliones, that first immigrated to the United States from northern Italy in the 1870s. Read more >>
It’s Sunday, Oct. 23, my first day off from the Twain trip. I’m spending it in Scituate, Mass., with my wife, Nancy; younger daughter, Laura; son-in-law Mike MacMillan; and their three children. Infant Joy (who is … Read more
Videos on YouTube portray Southbridge, Mass., as a dying mill town of loonies and losers. A snippet from producer Rod Murphy’s “Greater Southbridge” documentary makes Jerry Sciesnewski, a stuttering collector of empty soda and beer cans, … Read more
She was described as “the most noticed figure among American Muslim women” in a 2010 New York Times article. At 48, Ingrid Mattson struck me as a mirthful, sassy person, whose eruptive laughs were punctuated with … Read more
Let me just start by saying that Steve Courtney, publicist and guide at the Mark Twain House & Museum, does not believe in ghosts. But in the sleepy Hartford pre-dawn, Team Twain was intrepidly coming into … Read more
Kerry Driscoll was up-front with us: “I’m a bonafide Twainiac.” Driscoll is an English professor at St. Joseph’s College in West Hartford, and she’s spent the last 10 years working on a book about Mark Twain’s … Read more
