Mark Twain

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. Hearing cook Mary Ann Cord’s tale of enslavement, he published the sober Atlantic sketch “A True Story,” signaling a new, socially engaged turn in his writing.

Between 1873 and 1877 Twain deepened his intellectual life through Hartford’s Monday Evening Club, presenting unconventional papers on lying, phrenology, and determinism while championing women’s suffrage in pointed speeches. He founded the female Saturday Morning Club, mentored actor William Gillette, and ardently promoted Fisk University’s Jubilee Singers. 

Ever drawn to spectacle, he bonded with P. T. Barnum for publicity stunts but simultaneously suffered heavy losses in Senator John P. Jones’s failed Hartford Accident Insurance scheme—one of many speculative misadventures, despite a lone success with his patented self-pasting scrapbook. 

Reawakening childhood memories, he drafted and published The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), but British piracy and a delayed US release negatively impacted sales, intensifying Twain’s campaign for stronger copyright laws.

From 1876 through 1880, Twain’s career lurched between daring experiments and costly strife. He privately penned the bawdy Tudor pastiche 1601, scored a financial hit with the play Colonel Sellers, then quarreled bitterly with Bret Harte while their joint melodrama Ah Sin flopped. 

A humiliating Whittier-birthday speech and mounting household costs spurred Twain to close the Hartford house and roam Europe with Livy and their daughters. Writing along the Rhine, in the Alps, and later Munich and Paris, he studied German, mocked opera, marveled at Switzerland, and shopped extravagantly in Italy. His travel letters would eventually become A Tramp Abroad (1880), whose strong sales offset earlier disappointments even as his feud with Harte hardened into permanent enmity.

Rising social stature drew Twain into national politics. He backed Hayes in 1876, campaigned against patronage, and became the Republicans’ star orator despite his southern roots. In 1879, Chicago veterans feted Grant; Twain shared the platform with Sherman and Sheridan and ended the night with his celebrated “Babies” toast that made Grant laugh and cemented their friendship. He later supported Garfield, pled for Frederick Douglass’s reappointment, and mourned Garfield’s assassination. 

At home, Twain and Livy overspent on Tiffany-designed renovations. Twain drafted The Prince and the Pauper and battled publishers over royalties and Canadian piracy, blending literary ambition with ever-growing financial pressure.

Twain’s restless inventiveness shifted from notebooks to costly ventures. After modest success with his Self-Pasting Scrap Book, he sunk money into Dan Slote’s bogus Kaolatype engraving scheme and, despite fraud revelations, clung to the dream until 1886. Infatuated with James Paige’s complex typesetting machine, he became its lead investor and cheerleader, convinced it would revolutionize printing and yield millions. Parallel enthusiasms spawned a cumbersome “Memory-Builder” history game that alienated his friend Joe Twichell when leaked to the press. Twain and Livy began to patronize young artists.

During the early 1880s Twain was an exuberant, inventive father, staging charades, improvising bedtime epics and christening the dolls Hallelujah Jennings and Hosannah Maria for daughters Susy, Clara and Jean. The chapter describes Susy’s poetic intensity, Clara’s practical daredevil streak, and Jean’s devotion to animals. Livy ran the household effectively as tutor, disciplinarian, and nurse. 

However, Twain’s mercurial moods cast a shadow: In 1886 he discovered that his children feared his quick fury. Repeated illnesses—scarlet fever, diphtheria and Livy’s near-collapse—tested the household while Twain juggled literary work, finances, and an ever-expanding Hartford mansion.

Preparing a book version of “Old Times on the Mississippi,” Twain revisited the river in 1882, gathering new material for Life on the Mississippi. The journey sparked both fervent nostalgia and sharp disillusion with post-war Southern society. 

Back home, Twain struggled to finish the manuscript. He then financed its publication with James R. Osgood, blaming the firm when sales stalled. Seeking income, Twain teamed up with novelist George W. Cable for the 1884 and 1885 “Twins of Genius” reading tour, an 80-city commercial triumph marked by Cable’s outspoken racial advocacy, punishing travel schedules, and growing backstage friction. Twain then returned to Hartford for a family staging of The Prince and the Pauper.

Chernow chronicles the publication of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and its extraordinary literary, cultural, and commercial impact. Twain launched his own publishing firm, Charles L. Webster & Co., and published Huck Finn using a subscription model. 

The novel, shaped by Twain’s memories of enslavement and Southern life, places a Black fugitive named Jim and a poor white boy, Huck, at its moral center. Chernow explores Twain’s revolutionary use of vernacular, first-person narration and subversive social critique. He also traces the controversy surrounding the book’s racial language, the backlash from critics, and its eventual canonization as a foundational work of American literature.

After supporting Hayes and Garfield, Twain broke with the Republican Party in 1884 when James G. Blaine—whom he viewed as corrupt and racially intolerant—was nominated for president. Outraged, Twain joined the Mugwumps, a group of reform-minded Republicans who backed Democrat Grover Cleveland, prioritizing conscience over party loyalty despite backlash from his Hartford peers. 

The chapter also traces Twain’s evolving respect for Ulysses S. Grant, culminating in Twain’s pivotal role publishing Grant’s memoirs through Charles L. Webster and Company. This success marked Twain’s debut as a force in American publishing, and deepened his identification with independent, moral political judgment.

In 1885, Mark Twain reached a high point in personal happiness and public acclaim, celebrating his literary success, family life, and his 50th birthday. The chapter also reveals his deepening moral reflection, especially on the racial past of the United States. Twain quietly funded the education of Warner T. McGuinn, a promising Black law student at Yale, citing a belief in reparation owed by whites to African Americans. This act, and similar gestures, stood in contrast to Twain’s earlier racial satire, revealing a more direct commitment to justice. 

The chapter also details his ventures into publishing, growing financial strains, and his increasing entanglement with the Paige typesetter project.

In the mid-to-late 1880s, Twain balanced his publishing, financial, and creative pursuits with periods of leisure, literary readings, and family travel. He gave public readings, organized Browning Society meetings, and spent time at artistic colonies like Onteora and Olana. Twain visited Keokuk with his family, reconnecting with relatives and delivering a July 4th speech. His brother Orion showed increasing signs of mental illness, culminating in a near-fatal poisoning episode. Twain also entertained convicts and baseball crowds with characteristic flair. 

Amidst business anxieties, he began drafting A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, channeling his growing political radicalism into a satirical time-travel fantasy that sharply criticized monarchy, aristocracy, and organized religion.

Between 1888 and 1890, Twain’s standing as a “serious” author and moralist deepened while new friendships and an ugly theatrical dispute consumed him. Elated by Yale’s honorary master of arts, he defended the humorist’s duty to scourge privilege. He forged warm literary bonds with Robert Louis Stevenson and—after a trans-Pacific pilgrimage—the young Rudyard Kipling, whose admiration Twain reciprocated despite future political differences. 

Meanwhile, Twain’s invitation to critic Edward H. House to dramatize The Prince and the Pauper collapsed. A competing version by Abby Sage Richardson starring child-actor Elsie Leslie triggered lawsuits, press attacks, and a bitter rupture with the ailing House.

Financial strain deepened after Twain eased Charley Webster out of Charles L. Webster & Co. and installed Fred Hall. Civil War memoir sales slowed, the costly 11-volume Library of American Literature drained capital, and bank loans mounted. Simultaneously, Twain funneled ever-larger sums into James Paige’s still-unfinished compositor, confident it would eclipse the rival Linotype. A brief January 1889 test run fed his euphoria, but repeated breakdowns and missed deadlines followed. 

To cover expenses Twain sold royalty shares and solicited investors, while household economies became severe. Personal losses compounded the pressure: His brother-in-law Theodore Crane’s long illness and death, the lingering decline of Twain’s mother, and the November 1890 passing of Livy’s mother, Olivia Langdon.

In 1890 and 1891 Twain’s finances unraveled. Charles L. Webster & Co. staggered under debts from the Library of American Literature and fading Civil War memoir sales, while the voracious Paige compositor still swallowed thousands each month. Failed demonstrations and Senator John P. Jones’s last-minute withdrawal left Twain unable to fund manufacturing. Cash-starved, he sold games, trimmed family allowances, and even slashed his own stipend. 

At Bryn Mawr, daughter Susy’s homesickness—and a humiliating “Ghost Story” lecture—ended her college experiment. Concluding that Hartford’s costs were impossible, the Twain family dismissed servants, shut their beloved house, and sailed for Europe on June 6, 1891, hoping cheaper living abroad would avert bankruptcy.