Mark Twain House & Museum

If Mark Twain invited you over for dinner, you’d better come hungry.

Or to put it more accurately: Samuel Clemens and his wife entertained guests almost nightly at their Connecticut home and dropped around $100 a week on groceries (around $2,668 today)—so you’d best be prepared for an utter culinary assault.

“What makes the Mark Twain House unique on the landscape of writerly homes and haunts today is not just the amount of the family’s personal possessions in the home—scores of objects in every room—but the lengths that the House & Museum have gone to return it to its original state.” —Zachary Petit

Writer’s Digest

Take, for example, this menu from one summer night in the latter half of the 19th century, as documented by author Steve Courtney in his book “The Loveliest Home That Ever Was”:

Olives, salted almonds, and bonbons in “curious dishes” Soup of unknown provenance Sherry Fresh salmon in white wine sauce Naturally sparkling mineral water from a spring in Germany Sweetbreads in cream Broiled chicken with green peas and new potatoes Tomato salad with mayonnaise dressing Charlotte Russe cake and wine jelly with candied cherries and whipped cream And, finally, a plate of strawberries “the size of walnuts.”

Next came the entertainment: Clemens himself. Before the massive oak mantlepiece he had acquired from a castle in Scotland for his library, Clemens read excerpts from his new works; he told lively stories; he recited poetry; he workshopped material in real time, keeping what landed, and dropping what didn’t.

“We think of him as the writer … but he was almost the original improv guy,” says Jodi C. DeBruyne, director of collections at the Mark Twain House & Museum. “He really used the house and the things that were part of his everyday life to become Mark Twain.”

Endless conversation, fine cigars, and hot scotch followed—if he liked you. If he wanted you gone, DeBruyne says he’d hand out the dirt-cheap stogies from his personal stash that he obsessively smoked. Soon, guests would disappear into the night, a procession of stamped-out cigars acting as a breadcrumb trail to the carriages they fled in …

The Mark Twain House & Museum

Courtesy of The Mark Twain House & Museum, Hartford, Connecticut. Photo by Alana Borges Gordon.

Today, Clemens is ubiquitous with Missouri—and, indeed, his works brilliantly bring it to life. So, what was he doing living in Hartford, Conn.?

DeBruyne says Hartford was a publishing capital of the U.S. at the time, and the Clemenses arrived in the city in the early 1870s, on the heels of his first major book, The Innocents Abroad. Samuel’s wife, Livy (Olivia Langdon Clemens), planned the design of the house, and also paid for it with her own inheritance.

“They really wanted their guests to be impressed by this house,” DeBruyne says. “Livy wanted her home that she was going to manage to be fitting of not only their class, but who she wanted her husband to be—this famous writer.”

Livy worked with architect Edward Tuckerman Potter on the concept of the home, which emerged in the “Stick style” of the era in 1874, complete with 25 rooms across 11,500 square feet of living space. Potter specialized in the design of churches, and the home commands a sense of grandeur inside and out, from the ornate jigsaw work of the exterior to the soaring entry hall. Stories have long persisted that the house was designed to mimic the look of a steamboat … but staff at the home says they’re just that: stories. (Though, they admit, it would make a delightful one to tell guests.)

The Mark Twain House & Museum

Courtesy of The Mark Twain House & Museum, Hartford, Connecticut. Photo by John Groo

While Clemens dubbed it “the loveliest home that ever was,” The Hartford Daily Times branded it “one of the oddest-looking buildings in the state ever designed.” Nonetheless, Clemens and co. moved in as the home was still being finished … and the author grew famously cantankerous about the work going on around him. As Courtney documented, in one letter to family, Clemens opined, “I have been bullyragged all day by the builder, by his foremen, by the architect, by the tapestry devil who is to upholster the furniture, by the idiot who is putting down the carpets, by the scoundrel who is setting up the billiard table (and has left the balls in New York), by the wildcat who is sodding the ground and finishing the driveway (after the sun went down), by a book agent, whose body is in the backyard and the coroner notified.”

A key component of the Clemens’ design plan: modern conveniences and the latest remarkable tech of the era. They had central heating. They had hot running water. Two flushing toilets. A system of speaking tubes that carried voices throughout the home. Gas lighting. An electric burglar alarm that reportedly drove Clemens mad in its malfunctioning ruckus, inspiring the comical 1882 story “The McWilliamses and the Burglar Alarm.” The journal American History notes that Clemens claimed his house also had the first private telephone in the country … but it was so staticky that he declined invitations to invest in it, preferring instead to allocate his capital to other inventions, like the Paige typesetter (a fact that will go on to haunt him). “He loved technology, but he really loved to complain about technology,” DeBruyne notes. “I just imagine him having like a million computer viruses if he lived today.”

As Clemens’ fame (and fortune) grew, in 1881 the family hired Louis Comfort Tiffany (whose father founded Tiffany & Co.) and Associated Artists to decorate the home with extravagant, exotic accents. They went on to load the house with ornamentation and design elements from across the globe, from Morocco to Japan to Turkey.

Naturally, despite the brilliant outcome … it all drove Clemens mad.

As he put it (per Courtney):

“O, never revamp a house! Leave it just as it was, and then you can economize in profanity.”

The Mark Twain House & Museum

Courtesy of The Mark Twain House & Museum, Hartford, Connecticut. Photo by Frank Grace.

If only future generations had left it as it was. After the Clemenses sold the home in 1903 (more on that in a moment), it eventually became a boys’ school and was even carved up into apartments, before a group formed to preserve and save it and, eventually, restore it.

What makes the Mark Twain House unique on the landscape of writerly homes and haunts today is not just the amount of the family’s personal possessions in the home—scores of objects in every room—but the lengths that the House & Museum have gone to return it to its original state. DeBruyne says Clemens’ daughter Clara was instrumental in the process, returning to the home in the 1957 to create maps showing the original location of various key objects.

She also donated one of the most remarkable objects in the home today: Clemens’ striking walnut bed, which he had originally bought in Venice for $200, about $6,100 today. (He would be famously photographed in it—and he also died in it in 1910.) The pillows are arranged at the foot of the bed, where the Clemenses slept with a grand view of the many carved angels, which the author said brought pleasant dreams. (Which is one explanation, anyway; as Courtney put another unsourced version: “He wanted to see what he had paid for.”)

One key location outlined on Clara’s map (no, it’s not the closet where the kids hid their pet squirrels from their father): the desk on the third-floor billiards room where Clemens composed some of his greatest works, such as Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Beneath a ceiling painted with Clemens’ own version of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel—cigars, pipes, pool cues—and with his back to his beloved billiards table, lest he get distracted, here Clemens wrote the Great American Novel(s) and defined the country’s literary output in the process. (As he once downplayed things in a notebook, “My books are water; those of the great geniuses [are] wine. Everybody drinks water.”)

His desk in a brilliant state of chaotic disarray, he’d fan his papers out on the pool table, and his first editor was always Livy.

The Mark Twain House & Museum

Courtesy of The Mark Twain House & Museum, Hartford, Connecticut. Photo by John Groo.

But beneath Clemens’ projected gruff exterior rich with witticisms, DeBruyne says his most productive years were also his happiest years. Moreover, the house existed in deep symbiosis with his literary output, from those constant yet productive parties to nights spent with his daughters at that same Scottish mantel, where he was tasked with inventing stories for them on the spot from the objects on display there. If he repeated any plotlines, he had to start anew.

Ultimately, Clemens was perhaps right to bemoan the ill-functioning tech in his home—because it was a newfangled invention that ended his family’s time in Hartford.

Rather than investing in the telephone, Clemens poured large sums of money into an 18,000-part device called the Paige Compositor, designed to set lead type mechanically, versus by hand. Clemens, himself a former typesetter, saw the utility in a machine that could do so—but the investments (amounting to, today, millions of dollars) proved misguided, and when the machine failed to catch on, Clemens was in deep financial trouble. There is one remaining Paige Compositor, and it’s in the first floor gallery of the Museum Center today. The author would likely be appreciative if you were to offer it a scowl in passing.

The family relocated to Europe in 1891, with Clemens eventually embarking on a speaking tour to add some weight back to the coffers—and plans to eventually find their way back to Hartford. But as he was on a trip with Livy and Clara in 1896, Clemens’ daughter, Susy, died of meningitis at age 24 in the house while visiting. Ultimately, the family found it too painful to ever return to their once-beloved home—and they never did, closing a chapter in their lives that was equal parts transcendent and transformative, and in the end, tragic.

The Mark Twain House & Museum

Courtesy of The Mark Twain House & Museum, Hartford, Connecticut. Photo by Frank Grace.

By design, the Mark Twain House & Museum is like a bug in amber. But while it is deeply rooted in the past, its literary programs bring it vividly into the present. There’s an author talk series, courses and workshops on such topics as personal essays and point of view, a series of Clemens-focused conversations, the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award—which honors a work of fiction from the previous year that speaks with an “American Voice” about American experiences—not to mention a board of trustees featuring the likes of David Baldacci.

Literary program coordinator Omar Acevedo says the home launched the writerly initiatives to be more connected to the modern age—and, moreover, “we were also thinking, who are the current Mark Twains out there in the world? … Who are those authors who are tackling interesting and complex themes with their writing? So, we began to invite different authors, nonfiction and fiction alike, to come talk about their books.”

There’s even a program where writers can write in the home’s iconic library (just don’t bring a pen—not allowed, lest you risk staining something and bearing the brunt of what is likely a highly abrasive and caustic ghost).

Ultimately, playing off the words of his friend Josh Billings, Clemens once said, “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter—it’s the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”

Here’s to the singular place where he found the right words—and, who knows, where you just might, too.

The Mark Twain House & Museum is open year-round, and is located at 351 Farmington Ave., Hartford, Conn. For more, visit MarkTwainHouse.org.

This course will demonstrate that the best way to become a good writer is to study the writing of others, especially the work of the masters. Regardless of your genre (mystery, romance, horror, science fiction, fantasy, mainstream, or literary), you will hone your writing skills as a result of this class’ examination of the ways masters of the art and craft created intellectually and emotionally rich and compelling stories that became classics.

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