Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain)

Born:  Florida, Missouri; November 30, 1835
Died:  Redding, Connecticut; April 21, 1910

While not of Connecticut, Samuel Clemens was certainly the most celebrated popular author resident in Connecticut in the late nineteenth century. As a resident of Hartford from the early 1870s to the early 1890s, Clemens produced his most noted works: Roughing It (1872); The Gilded Age (1873), with Charles Dudley Warner, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876); A Tramp Abroad (1880); The Prince and the Pauper (1882); Life on the Mississippi (1883); The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884); and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889).

The amazing literary productivity of Clemens during his Hartford years can be traced to a number of elements. First of all, the Clemens who came to Hartford was able to draw upon a wealth of material he had accumulated as a youngster in the village of Hannibal on the Mississippi River; as a printer in Iowa, St. Louis, Philadelphia, and New York City; as a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi-from whence the pen name “Mark Twain,” a call on riverboats when sounding water depths; as a miner in Nevada; as a newspaperman with the Territorial Enterprise of Virginia City, Nevada, and the San Francisco Morning Call; and as a traveler to Europe and the Near East whose travel columns brought national syndication. Clemens first came to Hartford in 1868 to explore the publication of his travel writings with Elisha Bliss of Hartford's American Publishing Company, and the result was Innocents Abroad (1869), a great popular success that made Mark Twain a national figure.

Perhaps as important in Twain's success in Hartford as the varied experiences which he mined in his books was his love for his Hartford life. Samuel Clemens adored Hartford at first sight, finding the city a "vision of refreshing green" with homes "buried from sight in parks and forests of...noble trees." The affection of Clemens for the city was reinforced by his enjoyment of his lively neighbors in Nook Farm, a literary colony on the edge of Hartford. Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896), Charles Dudley Warner (1829-1900), and Isabella Beecher Hooker (1822-1907) were some of the members of the Nook Farm community who contributed to a way of life that featured congeniality, informality (all doors were always open), and sparkling conversation.

To the Nook Farm conviviality Clemens contributed much, including a Victorian Gothic house that has been called one-third riverboat, one-third cathedral, and one-third cuckoo clock. A wonder of gables, porches, and embrasures, the house had a kitchen facing the street ("so the servants can see the circus go by"), Tiffany decorations, Hartford's first telephone, and a fountain which even in the dead of winter played amidst calm lilies and flowering vines. How the quixotic Clemens must have delighted in the muted description of the house which appeared in the Courant: 'The novelty displayed in the architecture of the building, the oddity of its internal arrangements, and the fame of its owner will all conspire to make it a house of note for a long time to come."

But the Farmington Avenue home of Clemens was far more than an expression of the owner's wit and extravagance. To Clemens the house "had a heart, and a soul, and eyes to see us with; and approvals, and solicitudes, and deep sympathies." The sweetest years of the Clemens family—Samuel, wife Olivia Langdon Clemens, and daughters Susy, Clara, and Jean—came to be represented by the home of which Clemens wrote: "It was of us, and we were in its confidence, and lived...in the peace of its benediction." But the house which gave Clemens the "peace" crucial to his happiness and to his writing was to pass from his hands in the most bitter of circumstances.

The Hartford years of Clemens ended in the early 1890s as a result of a series of devastating business reverses. Clemens, a true son of a nineteenth-century America immersed in get-rich schemes, began a publishing house which at first did well with the Personal Memoirs of President Grant. Clemens was unfortunately lured by this success into a series of celebrity books, few of which did well. But the most calamitous investment of Clemens was the Paige typesetter, a machine which Clemens, the astute printer/author/publisher, was certain would revolutionize the printing industry. It did not. What it did do, however, was to cost Clemens a fortune and left him in 1891 forced to close his Hartford home—run at an estimated $100,000 a year—and travel to Europe where the family could live less expensively and where Clemens could recover financially via lecturing. In time, Clemens did make a financial comeback, but after leaving Hartford the Clemens family would know little happiness.

In 1896, by which time Clemens was solvent, the family's disintegration began. Clemens rented a house in England and sent for daughters Susy and Jean who had been living in Hartford with the Charles Dudley Warners. Just before she was to leave for England, Susy was stricken with spinal meningitis. Although the Clemens home was opened to comfort her, she died within days. Clemens took some satisfaction that Susy had died in the family home, but neither he nor Olivia Clemens ever truly recovered from Susy's tragic death at twenty-four. Mrs. Clemens refused to set foot in the house again, and Clemens unloaded it in 1903 for less than $30,000. The restlessness of Clemens took him in the next fifteen years through Europe; to homes in New York City, and Riverdale and Tarrytown, New York; and finally, in 1908 to an estate in Redding, Connecticut. Olivia Clemens died in Italy in 1904, and daughter Jean died in the Redding house after an epilepsy attack on Christmas Eve, 1909. Clemens, crushed by tragedy and a growing disillusionment, grew cynical and pessimistic. Thus, the death that came to Samuel Clemens himself in 1910 was in a sense redundant—the man had long since lost the zest for love and life that had been so characteristic of him in his Hartford years.

For Further Reading

Andrews, Kenneth R. Nook Farm: Mark Twain's Hartford Circle. Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1950.

Brooks, Van Wyck. The Ordeal of Mark Twain. New York, 1933.

Kaplin, Justin. Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain. New York, 1966.

Rugoff, Milton. The Beechers: An American Family in the Nineteenth Century. New York, 1981.

Entry by David M. Roth.

* Entry under revision.