Mark Twain’s Hartford Connecticut home

Our oldest daughter, Katie, went to the University of Connecticut in Storrs. For four years we drove past a sign in Hartford advertising the the Mark Twain House. I had seen pictures of house and thought it would be an interesting place to visit. Unfortunately, in the four years Katie was at UCONN, we never took the time to see the Twain house.

Late 2017, we were up in Connecticut for Thanksgiving. Following the holiday, we headed up to Hartford to stay a couple days with our youngest daughter, Maddie, and her newly minted husband, Pat. It turned out that the Twain house was only a couple miles from Maddie’s and Pat’s house. It seemed like a great opportunity for a little tour.

Mark Twain, the pen name of Samuel Clemens

The craftsmanship of the Twain house is amazing. Built in 1873-74, the Hartford house was home to the Clemens family until 1891. While living there, Samuel Clemens wrote many of his most famous stories, including Clemens wrote many of his best-known works while living there, including The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Prince and the Pauper, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.

World-renown author, humorist, publisher, inventor, and unsuccessful investor Mark Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens on November 30 in 1835. This was the antebellum South, from which sprang his most memorable characters – Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, Jim, and Aunt Polly. With so many memories formed in the South, I found it interesting that Clemens would chose to live most of his adult life in the North.

Who better than Clemens himself to tell his own story, and we are fortunate that Samuel Clemens wrote his autobiography. Clemens autobiography was published 14 years after his death. When first published in 1924, Clemens autobiography spanned 755 pages and was contained in two volumes. Unfortunately, it was written over many years and Clemens only wrote about things that interested him at the time he wrote or dictated each installment. In other words, his autobiography follows no set chronology. If you want to read the autobiography, I’d highly recommend the edition edited by Charles Neider.

Mark Twain (LEGO version) next to Maddie (non-LEGO version)

The arc of Clemens life begins in the antebellum South, travels through a brief time as a riverboat pilot, a Confederate soldier, a failed silver miner out West, a newspaperman and author, the public speaker Mark Twain, a husband, a father, an inventor and entrepreneur, a bankrupt who became solvent and wealthy again, and eventually a publisher who was responsible for publishing Ulysses S. Grant’s memoirs and, thereby, saving Grant’s widow from poverty.

The details of Clemens’ house, like his life, are too much to take in with a brief tour. I fully expect to return to the Twain house many times over the years to take in all the details I’m sure I missed in our short introduction to the famed author’s house.