Traveling with Twain

In Search of America's Identity

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The view from Quarry Farm

After Jervis Langdon died in 1870, his eldest daughter, Susan Langdon Crane, inherited the vacation home nestled in the hills of Elmira, Ny. Crane’s famous brother-in-law, Mark Twain, would spend his summers at Quarry Farm for … Read more >>

Bill Loos and the long-lost Huck Finn manuscript

In 1885-86, James F. Gluck, a young attorney in Buffalo, N.Y., received from Mark Twain half of the manuscript of his recently published novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Gluck was collecting letters and manuscripts by important … Read more >>

Knowing your place

On our first night in Elmira, Ny., we stayed at a bed and breakfast called the Painted Lady. The rooms were Twain-themed because Samuel Clemens had spent a significant portion of his life in Elmira, where … Read more >>

Two Elmira residents worthy of museums

Elmira, Ny.—a rust-belt railroad and manufacturing town of 29,200 that has lost 40 percent of its population since 1950—promotes itself as Mark Twain Country. Home to Twain’s burial site and the Quarry Farm study where he … Read more >>

Immigration: The key to Buffalo’s success and Cleveland’s decline?

Villified today by some as America’s enemies, immigrants and refugees actually may be saviors of the nation’s disintegrating cities. The Rust Belt cities of Cleveland, Ohio, and Buffalo, Ny., among the poorest in America, have in … Read more >>