Mark Twain

Twain, Livy, and baby Susy left grief-shadowed Buffalo for Hartford’s genteel Nook Farm in October 1871. Twain reveled in the reform-minded, Republican enclave of writers and reformers, including Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charles Dudley Warner, and especially Rev. Joseph Twichell, whose “muscular Christianity” and long Saturday walks became Twain’s chief delight. 

While Livy battled lingering sorrow over Langdon’s death, Twain resumed writing, finishing Roughing It and, with Warner, embarking on the satiric novel The Gilded Age, a scathing portrait of post-Civil War greed. Meanwhile, his brother Orion floundered in New York. Socially ambitious yet spiritually unsettled, Twain embraced Hartford’s respectability even as he sharpened his pen against national corruption.

In 1873 and 1874 Twain grew into a transatlantic celebrity, lecturing to packed English halls while establishing British copyrights and amassing costly furnishings for the Hartford mansion he and Livy built on Farmington Avenue. Designed by E. T. Potter, the 17-room, turret-studded house—likened to a steamboat and cuckoo clock—anchored their social life in Nook Farm among Stowe, Warner, and Rev. Twichell. 

Livy managed servants, edited Twain’s work, and endured ceaseless entertaining. Twain wrote in a cigar-hazed billiard-room and spent productive summer breaks at Elmira’s Quarry Farm, where the octagonal hilltop study was erected for him.