Twain’s “A True Story, Repeated Word for Word as I Heard It” tells the story of “Aunt Rachel,” is based on incidents in the life of Mary Ann Cord ("Auntie Rachel"), a formerly enslaved woman who worked as a cook for Twain's sister-in-law at Quarry…
Clemens’s stepfather Jervis Langdon was a “conductor” on the Underground Railroad, helping people escape enslavement in the South. This is Clemens’s copy of a history of a historical account written by William Still, a leading Black abolitionist…
Clara Clemens gave her father this copy of Irish poet William Allingham’s memoir for Christmas in 1907. The book contains several marginal notes in Clemens’s hand throughout, recording his thoughts as he read. Ever ready with a quick quip, Clemens…
The Conklin Pen Co. of Toledo, Ohio, featured Mark Twain in its advertisement for this self-filling pen, quoting him as saying: “I prefer it to ten other fountain pens because it caries its own filler in its own stomach and I can’t mislay it, even by…
Clemens was a heavy smoker, though he preferred cigars. His secretary Isabel Lyon gifted him this two-piece German pipe by, but he purportedly never smoked from it.
Clemens famously disliked typewriters, finding them “full of caprices, full of defects—devilish ones,” but he owned several throughout his career. This Williams “grasshopper” typewriter (called such because of the long-legged design that allowed an…
Clemens profusely annotated his copy of American abolitionist Moncure Conway’s Autobiography. His notes, such as “I seem to have met most of the people mentioned in this book” on page 277 of volume 1, evidence the early stirrings of Twain’s…