Mark Twain—writer, raconteur, provocateur, and social critic—was also Samuel Langhorne Clemens—son, father, brother, friend, and employer. With a focus on the 17 years Twain spent with his family in Hartford, and the relationships that sustained him through this period, Erin Bartram, Associate Director for Education at the Mark Twain House & Museum, explores the complex interaction between Twain’s public persona and private life. Only by attending to the two in concert can we truly understand the power and influence of his work in his own time and think about the ways that work still provokes us today.
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Erin Bartram is the Associate Director for Education at The Mark Twain House & Museum, a position she has held since 2019. She earned a Ph.D. in U.S. History from the University of Connecticut in 2015 and taught there and at the University of Hartford before joining the museum. She is also founder and editor at Contingent Magazine, and her work has appeared in the Washington Post, U.S. Catholic Historian, Religion & American Culture, Journal of the Early Republic, and the Chronicle of Higher Education.