Traveling with Twain

In Search of America's Identity

Twain’s Evolution

Born in pro-slavery Missouri, Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) absorbed the racist, nativist views of his community and slave-owning parents. Though he completed his formal education by age twelve he shed his backcountry biases and became more egalitarian as, at age seventeen, he began traveling the breadth of the United States, a world inhabited by Jews, Catholics, free blacks and newly arrived immigrants.

Posts in Twain’s Evolution

Scholar Kerry Driscoll investigates Twain's lingering prejudice against Indians

Scholar Kerry Driscoll investigates Twain’s lingering prejudice against Indians

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 >>

Hartford, CT Featured Twain's Evolution
Unbanning a Twain book...more than a century later

Unbanning a Twain book…more than a century later

As his 40th birthday approached, Mark Twain joined walking buddy Rev. Joe Twichell on a hundred-mile hike from Hartford to Boston. They walked 35 miles to North Ashford, Conn., before Twain’s aching knee joints and the … Read more >>

Central MA Featured Twain's Evolution

“The shame is ours”: the unlikely history of diversity at Yale Law School

When Mark Twain visited Yale in 1885 to lecture, Warner T. McGuinn, one of the first African-American students at Yale Law School, served as his campus guide and introduced him at a public meeting. Impressed by … Read more >>

New Haven, CT Featured Race and Ethnicity More...
Cartoonist Michael Kupperman becomes Mark Twain in Brooklyn's Prospect Park

Cartoonist Michael Kupperman becomes Mark Twain in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park

We met with Michael Kupperman in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park on a windy New York day. Kupperman is an American cartoonist and humorist whose work has appeared in The New Yorker. His most recent book Mark Twain’s … Read more >>

New York, NY Featured Twain's Evolution
Twain and the Elmira Correctional Facility

Twain and the Elmira Correctional Facility

Follow our tour of the Elmira Correctional Facility with Superintendent Paul Chappius and Deputy Superintendent Steve Wenderlich. During his Elmira years, Twain tested his lectures on prisoners. Video by Dan

Elmira, NY Featured Twain's Evolution

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Featured Content from Twain’s Evolution

Natalie Sheppard discusses being a black Mormon in the Salt Lake City area

Of all the cities and towns on Mark Twain’s route west that we visited, Salt Lake City honors him least. The city’s magnificent main library, a 240,000-sq.-ft., five-story-tall curved wedge-shaped beauty by Moshe Safdie and other … Read more >>

Remembrances of death as well as life in Unionville

To get to Unionville, Nevada, where Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) tried prospecting for silver and gold, we drive south for 17 miles from Interstate 80 along desert-like, brush land marked by yellow “Open Range” road signs, … Read more >>

Family history abounds in Kansas

After our visit to St. Joseph’s Pony Express Museum, we head west on the Pony Express Highway (Rte. 36) for northeastern Kansas to learn about my mother’s Methodist, farm-family parents, Loren Haskin (I was named for … Read more >>

We begin our westward trip at the Pony Express Museum in St. Joseph, Missouri

We begin our trip west by van across the Kansas plains from St. Joseph, Missouri, just as Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) and his brother Orion did 150 years ago. They had paid $200 each in 1861 … Read more >>

Small river towns of Keokuk, IA, and Cape Girardeau, MO, showcase Twain’s writings and letters

On the drive to Keokuk, Iowa, where a young Sam Clemens (Mark Twain) worked as a printer in the mid-1850s, we stop in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, for lunch. We have Twain as an appetizer. A building … Read more >>


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