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

Cahokia Mounds

When Dave Smith, 59, was a boy, he used to sled down the backside of 10-story-tall Monks Mound. The same Monks Mound, from which 1,000 years ago a Native American chief ruled a six-square-mile community of … Read more >>

A Twain hat becomes a trip essential

Food cooler for the van, check. Extra batteries for cameras, check. Twain hat for head, check. Well, okay, a Twain hat isn’t normally regarded as essential for a three-month trip, but I’m a hat guy. My … Read more >>

How it all began: From motorcycle fantasy to road-trip reality

Here’s how this trip began:  Mark Twain and I—he with narrowed blue-green eyes, exploding shock of red hair and white flannel suit, I with black, smoke-lens sunglasses, black helmet and black leather jacket—decided to go, as … Read more >>

Mark Twain meets the Internet

Mark Twain, please meet the Internet. Mark Twain, Internet; Internet, Mark Twain. I wonder a lot about what our lost literary greats would do if ever confronted by this fine web of technology. The people who … Read more >>

Who is the American?

“Are you an American?” Mark Twain once wrote in his notebook: “No, I am not an American, I am the American.” Twain was willing to compare Americans—however arrogant or ignorant—to smug, cultured Europeans and to declare Americans … Read more >>