Latest news with #TheAdventuresofTomSawyer
Yahoo
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
New executive director of Mark Twain House & Museum is a familiar face
Jeffrey L. Nichols has been named as the new executive director of the Mark Twain House & Museum following a nationwide search that took over a year. Nichols succeeds Pieter Roos, who served as executive director from 2017 to 2023 and announced his retirement at the end of last year. Nichols, a Naugatuck native, has held the position before. He was the executive director of the Twain House from 2008 to 2012. When he recently returned to Connecticut to visit his mother, he said 'I saw the house again and realized how much I loved the place.' Nichols' first day on the job will be June 9, a day before a major event sponsored by the Twain House — an appearance by Ron Chernow, whose new biography of Twain was published earlier this month. Chernow visited the Twain House photo archive while researching the book. Later in June, the Mark Twain House & Museum will host a book signing by novelist Joyce Carol Oates, the famed author's first visit to the Twain House. Mark Twain House Museum executive director Pieter Roos to retire from historic venue Nichols said Twain figures in many aspects of the other jobs he's held. For the past four years, he was at the National Civil War Museum and before that at George Heritage in Washington D.C., institutions which overlap with some Twain's activities and interests in the 19th century. Nichols also worked at Thomas Jefferson's Poplar Forest, an historic home in Virginia. He recalls bringing some of his former (and now future) Twain House colleagues to the Civil War Museum for a program about the house. 'Every job I've had, people get tired of me talking about Mark Twain,' NIchols said. He is looking forward to being back so he can share that great impact Mark Twain had and still has. 'We are very fortunate that Jeff Nichols will be leading the Mark Twain House and Museum,' Mark Twain House and Museum board chair Hans Miller said in a statement. 'His extensive experience in historic site and museum management, combined with his deep appreciation for Mark Twain and understanding of this organization, brings us a dynamic leader who can build on our past success.' Last year marked the 150th anniversary of when the house at 351 Farmington Ave. was built for Twain and his family. Twain not only wrote some of his famous works at the house, including 'Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,' 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer' and 'A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court,' he was actively involved with local businesses and newspapers. Twain left Hartford following the death of his daughter, toured the world for years as a comic lecturer and eventually returned to Connecticut to build a new home in Redding. Asked if he has favorites among Twain's many works, Nichols praised the author's short stories, mentioning 'To the Person Sitting in Darkness' as one of many examples of where 'Twain is writing about political and social issues of his era that still have great relevance in our world today.' Besides tours of the house, the Mark Twain House & Museum provides an archive of Twain materials, a museum with changing exhibits based on Twain's life and works, frequent lectures and special performances. Nichols noted that one of the enduring events at the institution, its 'Ghost Tours,' began during his previous time as executive director. 'There's a lot that's familiar, but there has also been a great expansion,' he said. 'Rooms have been finished since I was last here. I'm going to go into this now not looking back but seeing how we can move the organization forward. It's going to be great fun. I'm going to slide right back in.'
New York Post
18-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Post
Inside the mind of Mark Twain: Obsessive author and arrogant genius
In the late 19th century, Mark Twain was arguably the most famous author in the world, with classics like 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer' (1876) and 'Life on the Mississippi' (1883) cementing his status as a cultural icon. But despite his accomplishments, Twain seethed at the idea that anyone might criticize him. 9 Mark Twain around the time he wooed and wed Olivia 'Livy' Langdon in 1869. A sprawling new biography details his brilliant, yet often arrogance-filled, career. Courtesy of The Mark Twain House & Museum, Hartford, Connecticut For future editions of the book that rocketed him to fame, 'Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,' Twain planned a 'classic author's revenge fantasy,' writes Ron Chernow in his new, sprawling biography, 'Mark Twain' (Penguin Press), out now. Twain insisted on including a 'prefatory remark' that identified two newspaper editors that he particularly loathed as inspiration for his young fictional protagonist. 'In character, language, clothing, education, instinct, & origin,' wrote Twain, Huck Finn was meant as a 'counterpart of these two gentlemen as they were in the time of their boyhood, forty years ago.' Twain was eventually talked out of the vindictive plan by his wife. It's a side of the author that rarely gets remembered. During his life, Twain wrote 30 books, several thousand magazine articles and some 12,000 letters, but Twain's foremost creation 'may well have been his own inimitable personality,' writes Chernow. He's become an 'emblem of Americana . . . a humorous man in a white suit, dispensing witticisms with a twinkling eye, an avuncular figure sporting a cigar and a handlebar mustache.' 9 Twain standing before his boyhood home in Hannibal in May 1902. The house, he said, was much smaller than he remembered it. Courtesy of Mark Twain Papers and Project, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. But the truth wasn't quite so sanitized. Twain also had a 'large assortment of weird sides to his nature,' writes Chernow. Long before he became Mark Twain, he was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, born in 1835 and raised in Hannibal, Mo., a 'white town drowsing in the sunshine' on the banks of the Mississippi, as Twain would later immortalize. He created the Mark Twain pen name not just as a way to escape his many creditors but as 'the ultimate act of reinvention, the start of an attempt to mythologize his life,' writes Chernow. 9 Twain playing billiards in 1908 with some of the young woman who became his obsession during his later years. Courtesy of Mark Twain Papers and Project, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. His books became huge bestsellers, but nothing compared to his live performances. He could command a crowd with a mastery that was unmatched, once claiming that he would play with a dramatic pause during a reading 'as other children play with a toy,' writes Chernow. During a speech in Utica, NY, in 1870, he stood silently on stage for several uncomfortable minutes. 'After a prolonged, anxious interval, the audience erupted in laughter and applause, and Twain felt the full force of his power over them,' writes Chernow. But offstage, he was consumed with petty grudges and paranoia. Twain once told his sister that he was a man of 'a fractious disposition & difficult to get along with.' He would collect insults, waiting for the perfect moment to unleash them on anyone who'd wronged or disappointed him. 'He could never quite let things go or drop a quarrel,' writes Chernow. 'With his volcanic emotions and titanic tirades, he constantly threatened lawsuits and fired off indignant letters, settling scores in a life riddled with self-inflicted wounds.' 9 Mark Twain and fellow novelist George Washington Cable in 1884, when they shared top billing in a lecture series later dubbed the 'Twins of Genius' tour. Courtesy of The Mark Twain House & Museum, Hartford, Connecticut. Twain also had a bad habit of making terrible investments. 'Again and again, he succumbed to money-mad schemes he might have satirized in one of his novels,' writes Chernow. Most infamously, in 1880, he became convinced that a new typesetting machine, a 'fiendishly complex' device called the Paige Compositor, would become the future of publishing. 'The typesetter does not get drunk,' Twain wrote of the contraption in his personal notebook. 'He does not join the printer's union.' He invested $300,000 (about $10 million in today's money), and believed so strongly that the machine would lead to riches that he toyed with buying all of New York state with his future riches. 9 A photo of Twain when he was still known as Sam Clemens, posing in his hometown of Hannibal, Missouri in 1850, when he turned 15. Courtesy of Mark Twain Papers and Project, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 'He was asking how much it would take to buy all the railroads in New York, and all the newspapers, too—buy everything in New York on account of that typesetting machine,' remembered his housekeeper and maid Katy Leary. 'He thought he'd make millions and own the world, because he had such faith in it.' But the Paige Compositor, with its thousands of moving parts, proved to be a colossal failure. Only two of the machines were built, one of which is currently displayed at the Mark Twain House in Hartford, Conn. Strangest of all, Twain developed a fondness for teenage girls as he grew older. In his 40s, he began giving private lectures at the Saturday Morning Club, an all-girls' private club in which he was an honorary member. But this soon evolved into something decidedly creepier. 9 An embossed book cover for Adventures of Huckleberry Finn showing Huck, friend of Tom Sawyer. One of many iconic Twain tomes. Corbis via Getty Images At 70, he met 15 year-old Gertrude Natkin while attending a Carnegie Hall recital. They became pen-pals, with Twain writing to her six times a month, 'discarding any inhibitions about expressing affection toward a teenage girl who was a complete stranger,' writes Chernow. His only disappointment was that she wouldn't stop aging. On her 16th birthday, he wrote to her that 'you mustn't move along so fast . . . Sixteen! Ah, what has become of my little girl?' He was afraid to send her a kiss now, he declared, because it would come 'within an ace of being improper!' Twain eventually cut off ties with her, but Gertrude was just the beginning of his obsession with adolescent girls. He created a 'club of handpicked platonic sweethearts,' writes Chernow, dubbing them his 'angelfish.' As Twain explained in one of his letters, 'I collect pets: young girls — girls from ten to sixteen years old; girls who are pretty and sweet and naive and innocent.' 9 Jane Lampton Clemens, the eloquent and vivacious mother of Mark Twain in a photo from her later years. Courtesy of Mark Twain Papers and Project, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley Remarkably, the public didn't look upon Twain's angelfish as the 'sinister hobby of a lecherous old pedophile, but as the charming eccentricity of a sentimental old widower,' writes Chernow. While it certainly looks less than innocent, Chernow points out that there were never any accusations of predatory behavior from any of the girls, and mothers or grandmothers were always present as chaperones. 'The girls never reported forbidden sexual overtures from Twain,' writes Chernow. 'They played billiards and hearts and engaged in innocent pastimes. Twain insisted until the end that he'd merely 'reached the grandfather stage of life without grandchildren, so I began to adopt some.' He had a bottomless need for unconditional love, which he never received from his own daughters. Beyond the obvious inappropriateness, his adolescent teenage female fixation was a symptom of Twain's larger obsession with youth. The older he became, the more he believed 'that only the young were capable of true happiness,' writes Chernow. His 'angelfish' allowed him to disappear 'back into his vanished youth, to stop time, to blot out all the disappointments of adult life.' Twain's writing was in many ways an attempt to capture the innocence of youth. As some critics noted, despite the Huck Finn character being fourteen, his mind was 'devoid of sexual thoughts or fantasies,' writes Chernow. 9 Author Ron Chernow. The older and more famous he became, the more Twain pined for 'the vanished paradise of his early years,' writes Chernow. 'His youth would remain the magical touchstone of his life, his memories preserved in amber.' Twain eventually wrote sequels in which both Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn reappeared, but he had no interest in exploring them as adults. It was as if 'Twain could not bear to imagine them stripped of their youthful appeal,' writes Chernow. For him, youth was a gift and old age was a sham. 'I should greatly like to relive my youth,' he once wrote. 'And then get drowned.'
Times
27-04-2025
- Times
This is the most exciting way to see the US Midwest
Main Streets, megafarms and small family-owned homesteads. Red barns, white picket fences and cornfields. Stars, stripes and Peanuts. Mark Twain, swing bridges and grain silos the size of cathedrals. My voyage on the Upper Mississippi, sailing from St Louis in Missouri to Minneapolis and St Paul in Minnesota may be going against the river's flow yet it has a narrative arc of its own. A journey along the Mississippi feels as complex as America itself. It may not be the longest river in the US (the Missouri wins that prize) but every inch of its 2,350-mile length is packed with history, contradictions and beauty. At the St Louis Art Museum, I spend the evening before joining my voyage in a state of reverie among a profusion of Van Goghs, a sprinkling of Renoirs and some rather nice Renaissance art (free; The millionaires who bankrolled the 1904 World's Fair insisted that the St Louis Art Museum, housed in the middle of Forest Park, could never charge an entry fee. 'Am I safe to walk through the park in the evening?' I ask one of the museum staff as I leave around the start of twilight. 'Oh yes,' she says, and passing the picnics and wedding photoshoots that are taking place amid the park's boating ponds and tennis courts as I head northeast to my hotel, the Sonesta, a 20-minute stroll away, next to the park in the Central West End, I can understand why; this part of St Louis feels as gentle as a village. Forest Park is significantly bigger than Central Park and is fringed by houses, with wide verandas and the sort of late 19th-century confidence that the Smith family exuded in Meet Me in St Louis. After a hard few decades, the city has become an increasingly popular place for people to bring up children. Businesses are relocating here and the downtown area — newly accessorised with restaurants and hip hotels — seems to be firmly on the up. St Louis is known as the Gateway City, which does hint at a loss of identity even though the name makes sense. Below lies the Mississippi Delta; above it — and the area I'm exploring — is the Midwest. My cruise is called Heartland of America and it feels appropriate. The states through which the Upper Mississippi runs are America's breadbasket but also full of literary and cultural history. Hannibal, founded in 1819 and one of our first stops, is fully Mark Twain-themed, from Becky Thatcher's Diner to Finn's Foods and Spirits. The author of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer grew up here and there's a freshly painted fence outside his childhood home, which offers creaking floorboards and a full sense of context for his novels and journalism (£11; 'Along the Upper Mississippi, every hour brings something new,' Twain wrote. 'There are crowds of odd islands, bluffs, prairies, hills, woods and villages — everything one could desire to amuse the children. Few people ever think of going there, however.' But we are. The Viking Mississippi eschews the retro paddle steamer look for something sleeker. It has 193 cabins that are smart and surprisingly spacious-feeling — despite the constraints of having to fit through the Mississippi's lock system. They all have balconies with chairs and tables. In late August temperatures were in the 30s, but the cabin's air conditioning never faltered (as long as you closed the sliding door correctly). The ship also has room for two restaurants; on the top deck, the River Café is more informal and has outdoor seating, while the Restaurant is quieter with an à la carte menu. There's also space for a large library area and outdoor terraces — the one aft, near the bar, has particularly nice rocking chairs. In the evening, the entertainment includes a thoughtful and tuneful look at the history of music in St Louis, talks about history and wildlife in the area and demonstrations of mint julep-making. As we head north, the menus reflect the region, with fish and steak of course, but also corn chowder and local cheeses. 'When we started, there were 30 small farms like us. Now there are just two,' says Ralph Krogmeier, who founded his farm Hinterland in 1978 and now runs it with his wife, Colleen ( Hinterland, surrounded by motion-picture perfect cornfields a thirty-minute drive from our stop in Burlington, Iowa, has survived because it now makes award-winning cheese and ice cream. 'Land was cheap then. It isn't now,' he adds. • 17 of the best US cruise lines On hearing this, a small group of passengers nod in an understanding way before they lean over the railing to admire some of the Holstein and Jersey cows. They are dairy farmers from New Zealand who examine the corn-based winter feed that's grown in the surrounding fields with great interest. When I point out that this could be classed as a busman's holiday for them, they laugh. 'Makes it tax-deductible,' one says, with a farmer's directness and a smile. Apart from the fact-finding Kiwi dairy farmers and me, everyone on the ship is American, as are the crew. The landscape feels properly American too, from the railroad tracks with the mournful whistles of trains heading through to the bald eagle I spot and the Victorian architecture of the smaller towns where we stop. As night falls, the ship's engines are quiet enough to be able to — just — pick out the sound of cicadas as we pass woodlands, grand riverbank houses and the occasional campsite. The ship's swimming pool, a narrow strip at the stern, turns out to be really conducive to overhearing conversations. 'When I was teaching civics in high school, I always made sure a module on Agent Orange was on the curriculum,' I hear a woman on my left say as she discusses the Vietnam War with another passenger. On the other side, a man is telling his friends about coming across a bear and her cub while out hiking earlier in the year. 'I just tried to make as much noise as I could, and hoped that I wasn't between her and the cub,' he says. If anywhere feels like the repository of American pride, hopes and dreams though, it's the John Deere Pavilion ( in Moline, Illinois. First, we look at the homes the Deeres built in Moline's leafy suburbs. Victorian edifices stuffed with Flemish tapestries and ceiling frescoes from Venice are interspersed with notices that the company refused to repossess farm equipment in the Depression and that John Deere once helped to break up a meeting of segregationists. In the Pavilion, however, it's full-throttle agricultural admiration, with museum-like reverence given to a boxed 1970s Barbie in John Deere clothing, early tractors polished to a sheen and — in pride of place — a corn-harvesting combine that costs £1.07 million. One of the passengers on this excursion brings out his phone to show a photo of his grandfather's 1931 John Deere tractor, which he's restored, and the other passengers cluster around admiringly. • Read our full guide to cruise holidays A stop at Dubuque means that we're just over an hour's coach ride from Taliesin, where America's most famous architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, lived. His grandparents had settled in this part of Wisconsin from Wales and he created a home and a college here, still with the plyboard desk from which he designed buildings such as Fallingwater and the Guggenheim Museum in New York. The house and grounds are a delight to wander around and the gardens are a profusion of orchards, trees and shrubberies (tours from £27pp; Frank Lloyd Wright's home in Taliesin ALAMY Meanwhile, the ship's bridge team are making endless calculations on the swell of the river when it comes to navigating. 'Whenever you come back after a break, this feels like a completely new river,' says Cory Burke, who is piloting the ship. Our journeys demonstrate how much effort goes into trying to tame the Mississippi. After a few days, I find my tribe on the rocking chairs at the fore of the ship. With wine and cocktails in hand, passengers are enthralled as the ship manoeuvres through locks and bridges. And we wave at the lock-keepers. There turns out to be a lot of waving in the Upper Mississippi. When we head inland, the cornfields ripple just as they do in the movies, fields and fields of them; flat in Iowa, undulating hills in Wisconsin. But on the Mississippi itself, every time a jet ski or fishing boat comes alongside, as well as a passing lock-keeper, people wave. Sometimes I think, no, this is an effort for them, but every single time someone sees the ship, they wave. We arrive in La Crosse, a cool little Wisconsin college town on the day Trump stages a rally there before the presidential election that will take place two months after my trip. The residents remain polite but the fourth-generation owner of Kroner's Hardware store is sporting a tie-dye T-shirt, while the baristas of the Root Note coffee shop are in a range of pro-choice and rainbow outfits. Meanwhile, makeshift stalls arrive with Trump memorabilia, including bright gold baseball caps and fake dollar bills with Trump's face. Back on board though, there's no talk of politics, which is an American civics lesson in itself. Instead, people chat and laugh with their fellow passengers and head on deck to admire the Mississippi in all its glory. Sarah Turner was a guest of Viking, which has seven nights' full board from £5,295pp on a Heartland of America voyage, including flights, some excursions, tips and drinks with meals, departing on August 16, 2025 (
Yahoo
21-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Deseret News archives: Remembering Mark Twain, who visited Utah in 1861
A look back at local, national and world events through Deseret News archives. On April 21, 1910, author Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, died in Redding, Connecticut, at age 74. A notice in the April 21 Deseret News read: 'REDDING, Conn., April 21 — Samuel L. Clemens (Mark Twain), passed one of the most comfortable nights last that he had since his illness began and it was stated at Stormfield that he awoke after a refreshing sleep, feeling much better and brighter, although still very weak.' According to the report, Clemens spent time writing. His doctors offered no promises. But Clemens died later that night. A popular writer, lecturer and humorist, Twain's novels 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer' and 'Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' have always been popular though dated. Samuel Longhorne Clemens was born on Nov. 30, 1835. Born and raised in Missouri, he took the pen name Mark Twain in 1863 while working as a newspaper reporter in Virginia City, Nevada. Twain is perhaps best known for his depictions of boyhood on the Mississippi. But he also traveled widely throughout Europe, the Holy Land and the American West, documenting his adventures in several books. His 1872 'Roughing It' recounts his 1861–67 journey by stagecoach through the Wild West, including a two-day stop in Salt Lake City, narrated with Twain's trademark wit and satire. Though he achieved fame as a writer, he also faced financial ruin during his life, the loss of loved ones, and periods of deep internal conflict that he hid from many. 'Action speaks louder than words, but not nearly as often.' 'If you tell the truth you don't have to remember anything.' 'Life is short. Break the rules. Forgive quickly. Kiss slowly. Love Truly. Laugh uncontrollably. Never regret anything that makes you smile.' 'Always do right; this will gratify some people and astonish the rest.' 'Do not put off until tomorrow what can be put off till day-after-tomorrow just as well.' In 'Roughing It,' Twain describes the impetus for his journey west: His brother, Orion Clemens, had just been appointed secretary of the Nevada Territory, and he invited the younger Clemens to accompany him to the region as his own private secretary. Twain, who had never left home, eagerly accepted, assuming they 'would see buffaloes and Indians, and prairie dogs, and antelopes, and have all kinds of adventures, and maybe get hanged or scalped, and have ever such a fine time.' While the brothers' time spent in Salt Lake City was brief, Twain's narrative offers a humorous (albeit exaggerated and irreverent) outsider's perspective on early Utah. Twain is impressed by the Mormon settlers' industry, puzzled by their practice of polygamy, bored by their scripture and enthralled with their mountainous landscape. Here are some stories from Deseret News archives about Clemens/Twain: 'What Mark Twain had to say about Utah and Mormons when he visited Salt Lake City' 'Mark Twain's Hannibal' 'The unaccountable Mark Twain' 'Val Kilmer brings one-man show 'Citizen Twain' to Salt Lake' 'Mark Twain active in final years' 'Mark Twain remains censored, and uncensored' 'Twain causes flap in church's fate'
Yahoo
18-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Today in history: 1868, Mark Twain lectures in Marysville
On Saturday night, April 18, 1868, residents of Yuba and Sutter counties had an opportunity to attend a comedy show disguised as a lecture performed by one Samuel Clemens, a.k.a. Mark Twain. Mark Twain never wrote for a newspaper in Marysville, despite many claims that he did. The legend persisted for many decades, without any proof, that a desk at a former location of The Appeal-Democrat was once occupied by Twain, but biographies about Twain that mention his work at other Northern California newspapers are silent about Marysville newspapers. Those same biographies discuss his lecture series throughout the country, including swings through the American west. He is known to have visited the city twice in the 1860s, both times to perform. In 1868, three years after his short story 'The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,' and eight years before publishing 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer', 33-year-old Twain appeared at the Marysville Theater, located on the east side of D Street between First and Second streets. The D Street Theater was a stop for popular acts playing the west coast, located on the rail line between San Francisco and Portland. An ad in the Marysville Daily Appeal described Twain's 1868 lecture in Marysville as being on 'Pilgrim Life…a sketch of his notorious voyage to Europe, Palestine, etc., on board the steamship Quaker City.' The edition of the Daily Appeal following Twain's performance had took only perfunctory notice of the appearance. 'Mark Twain was the observed of all observers on Saturday,' it noted in a column of items that included reports of downed fences and the numbers of farmers and teams of mules coming and going from wholesale houses. Twain was impressed with the Marysville he visited. In his words, 'This is the most generally well built town in California—nothing in it, hardly, but fine, substantial brick houses. I found there many a man who had made his fortune in Washoe, and didn't have the shrewdness to hold on to it, and so had wandered back to his old Marysville home. It is a pity to see such a town as this go down, but the citizens say the railroads are sapping its trade and killing it. They are a sociable, cheerful-spirited community, and if the town should die, they would hardly die with it.'
