Mark Twain

Back in New York, Twain’s fame mutated into full-blown modern celebrity: Reporters trailed him, crowds applauded his strolls, and manufacturers clamored for endorsements. He deftly introduced the 26-year-old Boer-War hero Winston Churchill at the Waldorf, praising the man while condemning British and US imperialism alike. 

Newspapers mined his every quip, while Twain alternately courted and scolded them, fielding floods of autograph and blurb requests. He railed at publishing “sharks” even as lucrative uniform editions appeared. Turning reformer, he branded Tammany Hall, a political organization, a civic scourge, stumped—mostly with barbed humor—for Columbia president Seth Low, and helped the Fusion ticket sweep New York’s 1901 mayoral election.

In 1901 Twain retreated to “The Lair” on Lower Saranac Lake, drafting fiction and beginning a searing essay on mob violence, “The United States of Lyncherdom,” which he ultimately withheld from publication. A yacht cruise with Henry Rogers briefly lifted his spirits before the anniversary of Susy’s death.

Back in public, Twain joined an ecumenical celebration of Abraham Lincoln and lauded North-South reconciliation, yet sidestepped the issue of enslavement. Disturbed by rising lynchings and US imperial ventures, he equated domestic racism with overseas aggression, blasting both in essays such as “To the Person Sitting in Darkness.” The piece ignited national controversy, pitting Twain against missionaries, politicians, and editors while solidifying his role as a fierce anti-imperialist voice in the US.

In autumn 1901, the Twain family leased a grand house in Riverdale, close enough to New York for Clara’s music lessons and Jean’s osteopathic visits while offering Livy river views during her worsening illness. 

Twain received an honorary doctorate at Yale, clashed privately with Livy over his increasingly caustic public statements, and escaped on a Caribbean cruise with Henry Rogers. Financial strain from new real-estate deals persisted. 

In May 1902, Twain embarked on an emotional homecoming to Missouri. Revisiting St Louis, Hannibal, and finally Columbia—where he accepted a University of Missouri degree—Twain confronted fading boyhood landscapes, honored the Mississippi’s beauty, and felt both revived and poignantly aware of time’s irrevocable passage.

In the summer of 1902, Twain moved his family to “The Pines” in York Harbor, Maine, hoping the sea air would ease Jean’s epilepsy and Livy’s heart troubles. Instead, Jean suffered fresh convulsions and Livy collapsed with a near-fatal attack that left her bedridden, fearful, and isolated on doctors’ orders. 

Twain, racked with guilt, was largely barred from her room. Clara oversaw nursing, while Sue Crane and Twain’s new secretary Isabel Lyon steadied the household. Back in Riverdale that autumn, Livy remained fragile, Jean contracted pneumonia, and Twain balanced private anguish with public duties. He hosted a lavish 67th-birthday banquet, launched a darkly comic “write-my-obituary” contest, and sought solace in affectionate letter-clubs with distant young admirers.

Winter of 1902 and 1903 found the Riverdale house operating as a private infirmary. Livy, confined to bed after repeated heart attacks, was shielded from all distress; Twain was limited to brief, nurse-timed visits and communicated with her by slipping affectionate notes under her door. Clara and Jean battled measles, and Twain himself suffered bronchitis. Nevertheless, Twain still railed against conventional doctors and pinned his hopes on osteopathy and Plasmon. He also obsessively attacked Mary Baker Eddy, an American religious leader and author, in print. 

Doctors urged that Livy recover abroad. Despite her frailty, she insisted on Italy. In October 1903, the family endured a grueling voyage to the inhospitable Villa di Quarto near Florence, where Livy’s condition worsened amid clashes with the vindictive land-owner.

Livy died suddenly on June 5, 1904, at Villa di Quarto, moments after Twain had shared plans for a permanent home. Her peaceful passing shattered the family: Twain sunk into self-recrimination, Jean suffered renewed seizures, and Clara collapsed into catatonic withdrawal. 

After hostile skirmishes with the villa’s countess and physicians, Twain shipped Livy’s coffin home. He conducted a quiet Elmira funeral and resettled in Tyringham before leasing a Gothic townhouse at 21 Fifth Avenue. Legal vendettas against the countess and a doctor fueled his anger, while Isabel Lyon’s duties expanded from secretary to de facto house manager and confidante as Twain’s health faltered and his daughters battled trauma.

During winter of 1904 and 1905, Twain was depressed and yet newly militant. He drafted biting monologues against Czar Nicholas II, King Leopold II, and American jingoism. He also became politically active by chairing benefits for Russian Jews, supporting Congo Reform crusaders, and condemning Theodore Roosevelt’s imperialism and racism. Pamphlets such as King Leopold’s Soliloquy circulated with shocking photographs. Twain’s “The War Prayer,” a searing anti-patriotic parable, remained unpublished after magazines recoiled from it. 

Twain’s activism strained friendships and fueled press skirmishes. It also deepened his pessimism about human nature. Without Livy’s moderating influence, his late style grew harsher, turning 21 Fifth Avenue into a workshop for righteous outrage.

In 1905, Mark Twain’s Fifth-Avenue household reorganized around his secretary, Isabel Lyon, who—half-employee, half-surrogate family member—assumed Livy’s former roles as housekeeper, confidante, and literary sounding board. Isabel idolized “the King,” tended Jean during epileptic spells, and managed Clara’s convalescence in a Connecticut sanitarium. 

Retreating to Lone Tree Hill in Dublin, New Hampshire, Twain regained creative vigor, drafting the fantastical Three Thousand Years Among the Microbes, the dark animal-rights tale “A Horse’s Tale,” and—most lovingly—Eve’s Diary, a pastoral tribute to his late wife. However, beneath the productive surface lay a deep grief. He was concerned with Jean’s fragile health, and there were latent tensions in the family surrounding Isabel’s role and status.

Back in New York after their restorative Dublin summer, the Twain household unraveled under recurrent illness. Clara’s sinus surgery halted her music; Twain battled gout; and Jean’s epilepsy escalated into frequent, violent seizures that terrified staff and culminated in an impulsive blow to long-time maid Katy Leary. 

Isabel Lyon struggled to mediate, consulting specialists and recording the family’s turmoil. Twain, shaken by Jean’s condition and his own helplessness, denounced existence as a “swindle,” yet delegated care to Isabel, exposing fragile roles and unresolved tensions that Livy had once soothed.

On November 30, 1905, Colonel George Harvey marked Mark Twain’s 70th birthday with a lavish five-hour dinner at Delmonico’s for 172 notable guests, complete with an opera orchestra and souvenir busts. Greetings arrived from literary figures worldwide, and Twain’s speech mixed comic “health tips” and a valedictory image of reaching “Pier 70.” Newspapers hailed his elevation from humorist to national sage. 

In parallel, Twain pursued legal action over his failed Plasmon investment, trusted Ralph Ashcroft to manage company disputes, and fended off unauthorized biographers. He gradually welcomed Albert Bigelow Paine, whose stenographic sessions—begun in January 1906—would furnish an extensive, embargoed autobiography and help cement Twain’s carefully curated public legend.

After Livy’s death, Twain’s long-standing fondness for adolescent girls intensified into the “Aquarium Club,” a circle of carefully chosen “angelfish” aged roughly 10 to 16 years old. The episode began with 15-year-old Gertrude Natkin in December 1905, and soon expanded to a dozen protégées who received effusive letters, theatre tickets, and prolonged visits—albeit always chaperoned by mothers or by Isabel Lyon. 

Twain, now lonely and 70, cast the girls as surrogate grandchildren and symbols of unspoiled youth, while his own daughters looked on with mixed unease. Critics later debated possible pedophilic overtones, though contemporaries saw the fixation as an eccentric, but innocent, outlet for the widower’s affections.

In 1906, Mark Twain deliberately withdrew from most reform causes, accepting only a few public appearances—most notably a witty but barbed speech at Carnegie Hall for Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute. Preoccupied with age and death, he confided to editor friends that “a halo” would soon replace his white suit and cigars. 

At home, he relied heavily on Isabel Lyon while Clara recuperated in sanitariums and Jean’s epilepsy worsened, creating sharp tensions in their Dublin, New Hampshire retreat that Twain dubbed “The Lodge of Sorrow.” That summer he privately printed What Is Man?, a deterministic dialogue asserting humankind’s mechanical nature, which Livy had once forbidden and contemporaries received coolly.

After dubbing the secluded Dublin rental “Wuthering Heights,” Twain repeatedly escaped to New York and Henry Rogers’s yacht, leaving epileptic Jean and over-stretched Isabel Lyon in deepening isolation. Jean’s seizures worsened; Isabel’s nerves collapsed. Hopes of a fresh start, including Clara’s tentative vocal debut and plans for a new family home in Redding, Connecticut, were offset by constant quarrels, Twain’s rest-cure absences, and Jean’s despair over illness and love. 

By autumn 1906 doctors had placed Jean in Hillbourne Farms sanitarium at Katonah, while Clara returned to a sanitarium herself. Twain, chastened yet still restless, promised to “stop junketing,” even as he eyed new travels and cultivated more adolescent “angelfish.”