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

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 >>

Buffalo News newsroom aims for diversity

“Intern to editor.” It has a nice ring to it. And in 19 years at the Buffalo News, Margaret Sullivan did just that. She’s been the top editor at the News for 12 years, and one … Read more >>

Boyhood Museum’s treatment of slavery evolves

In 1996 Mark Twain scholar Shelley Fisher Fishkin, editor of the Oxford Mark Twain and author of Was Huck Black?: Mark Twain and African-American Voices, wrote a skeptic’s critique of Hannibal and its Mark Twain Boyhood … Read more >>

Captain Steve Terry embodies Twain’s riverboat spirit

Think of Captain Steve Terry, the 52-year-old pilot-owner of the Mark Twain Riverboat, as a 21st-century Twain. Terry, as did Twain, loves life on the Mississippi. He earned his license at age 19, becoming the youngest … Read more >>

Hal Holbrook tells us to visit Jackass Hill

Actor Hal Holbrook, 86, has been playing Mark Twain for 57 years, a decade longer than Samuel Clemens wrote as Mark Twain. In the first week of our Twain trip we drove 1,325 miles (almost 500 … Read more >>