What's in a name?

A number of studies show that a bottle of wine priced at $100 will taste better than a bottle priced at $5, even if the contents are identical. Similarly, a painting by an acknowledged master will get tens of millions of dollars, but the same work by anonymous might warrant $1 at a garage sale.

Well, the same principle applies in writing since a novel by J. K. Rowling will sell tens of millions of copies, yet (as the Times points out) the same book by unknown author Robert Gailbraith sells only a few thousand copies.

Of course, Rowling had to start out as an unknown, too, so it’s not impossible to rise, but it has to feel discouraging for beginning novelists.

Seamus Heaney is dead

The great poet Seamus Heaney has died.

Heaney's work is truly extraordinary. If you can read "Digging" without feeling moved, well, then you're not human.

Unfortunately, I didn't get a chance hear him read in person. He was scheduled to read at Southern Illinois University in the spring of 1995, but a few weeks before the appearance, he won the Nobel Prize and had to cancel because of a sudden crush of commitments. By the time he made his rescheduled reading a year or so later, I'd graduated.

Do some digging yourself with some of his poems.

And hoist a pint for Seamus tonight.

Slainte go saol agat,
Bean ar do mhian agat.
Leanbh gach blian agat,
is solas na bhflaitheas tareis antsail seo agat.

"Health for life to you,
A wife of your choice to you,
Land without rent to you,
A child every year to you,
And the light of heaven after this world for you."

House of Cards (Netflix)

House of Cards is the new Netflix original series, starring the great Kevin Spacey, based, loosely, on the original BBC series of the same name. Both versions are worth your time, especially if you like stories of political intrigue.

Although the first season of the American version is quite good, it had big shoes to fill, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, it falls a bit short, beginning with the name of its protagonist, Francis Underwood (Spacey), the Democratic Whip in the House of Representatives. While I realize that the name “Urquhart” (pronounced Ur-kurt) is rare in the United States, its harsh, guttural sound, with its implied malevolence, sets a tone in the BBC version that “Underwood” simply doesn’t have.

More significantly, however, the plot, particularly towards the end of this first season, has some wholly unconvincing twists that I won’t elaborate on here in case you see the show. The acting in the series, however, is consistently superb, beginning with Spacey’s performance, in which his character pretends to be obsequious toward the President but really plans to seize power at the first opportunity. Also outstanding is Robin Wright, who plays his wife and ally in his quest for power. Through her chilliness and narcissism, there’s a hint of vulnerability.

Both versions of the show are well worth your time, especially if you like your anti-heroes on the cynical side, but I especially hope that you’ll check out the BBC version. And if you think I’m being unpatriotic by preferring that series, I’ll just have to reply, “You might think very well that, but I couldn’t possibly comment.”

P.S.: Once you’ve seen the Netflix show, you’ll enjoy this parody, starring Spacey himself.

Why not major in English?

Adam Gropnik, writing on The New Yorker blog, surveys the recent articles attacking and defending the value of the humanities—specifically English majors—but then shrugs and says, “Why not?” He adds:

You choose a major, or a life, not because you see its purpose, which tends to shimmer out of sight like an oasis, but because you like its objects. A good doctor said to me, not long ago, “You really sort of have to like assholes and ear wax to be a good general practitioner”; you have to really like, or not mind much, intricate and dull and occasionally even dumb arguments about books to study English.

. . .

Even if we read books and talk about them for four years, and then do something else more obviously remunerative, it won’t be time wasted. We need the humanities not because they will produce shrewder entrepreneurs or kinder C.E.O.s but because, as that first professor said, they help us enjoy life more and endure it better. The reason we need the humanities is because we’re human. That’s enough.

Will you please be quiet, please?

I can only do one thing at a time, and I can’t do anything if it’s not quiet. George Prochnik, in an essay in the Times, has some interesting thoughts on this topic. As he notes, “The findings [in one recent study] were clear: even when people stayed asleep, the noise of planes taking off and landing caused blood pressure spikes, increased pulse rates and set off vasoconstriction and the release of stress hormones. Worse, these harmful cardiovascular responses continued to affect individuals for many hours after they had awakened and gone on with their days.”

How Brian Doyle became a writer

Brian Doyle offers some useful tips about how to become a writer in this brief essay in The American Scholar.

Wonders of the Universe

An iPad app well worth your time (and easily worth its $5.99 price) is Wonders of the Universe, hosted by physicist Brian Cox. I spent many hours happily scrolling through the app and learning about basic physics, from the particles of the quantum world to the monstrous black holes that destroy entire stars.

The app, which combines the text of the book with dozens of video and animated clips from the BBC television series, is gorgeous and extremely informative. Divided into eight episodes, from “Subatomic” to “Universe,” with each episode then further subdivided into chapters such as “Gravity,” the app is organized so that you can tour the universe systematically or simply dive in and out. The graphics are particularly beautiful and really pop out on the iPad’s Retina screen. Most importantly, I think, the text is clearly written for the general reader.

The host, a professor of physics who used to play in a rock band that had some hit songs, has an extremely engaging and enthusiastic personality, which has made him one of the most popular science presenters in England. He’s currently affiliated with the University of Manchester and conducts research into particles at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland.

So if you’re interested in how the universe came to exist, or if you want to know how it’s going to end, check out Wonders of the Universe.

My sinister hand

I’m a leftie (both in politics and in handedness), so this item, from the New Yorker blog, caught my eye.

Thanks for not asking

So your friend mentions, in passing, that he’s started working on a new novel. You’re curious, so you want to ask, “What’s it about?” But, you think, maybe that’s too forward, and so you decide to keep quiet. A few seconds later, however, you worry that if you don’t ask, your friend will think you’re a jerk who can’t be bothered to care. So you resolve to ask, but, by now, the pause is awkward, so you just change the topic.

I’ve found myself in this dilemma, more than once, so I’m happy to know that my instinct not to ask was probably the right call. As Mark Slouka says, in today’s Times:

If writers agree on anything—which is unlikely—it’s that nothing can damage a novel in embryo as quickly and effectively as trying to describe it before it’s ready. Unfortunately, because we’re writers, aka bipedal nests of contradictions, avoiding the temptation to share is never as easy as simply keeping our mouths shut.

Getting pumped!

What’s the best way to get in the proper frame of mood to write? Vigorous sex? A shot of smooth bourbon? A walk in the woods? This fascinating short article, by Maria Konnikova in Scientific American, discusses how such luminaries as Vladimir Nabokov, Mark Twain, and John Cheever got “pumped” before settling down to write:

It’s not so strange, then, that in ritual, artists find such consistent gratification and creative value. While ritual in itself may not play any role in the quality of the creative output, the simple act of engagement could heighten both anticipation and enjoyment of the entire creative process. And while the suffering artist is another stereotype that’s right up there with the quirky artist in popular appeal, when it comes to actual creative quality, few things beat the engaged mind.

Thinking about Hamlet

I teach Hamlet frequently, so I certainly agree with the many critics who consider it to be one of the touchstones of literature. Indeed, the play goes to the heart of what makes us human. For example, this review of the new book Stay Illusion!, by Simon Critchley and Jamieson Webster, discusses Hamlet’s impact on Sigmund Freud, who, of course, was also thinking about what makes us human. As its author, Joshua Rothman, blogging for the New Yorker, says:

Watching “Hamlet,” we think that it’s about revenge—a familiar, safe subject. In fact, “Hamlet” is about desire. The real engine of the play is Oedipal. Caught up in Hamlet’s quest to kill Claudius—and reassured by his self-censure—we can safely, and perhaps unconsciously, explore those desires. Freud thought that prudery and denial had for centuries prevented critics from acknowledging the play’s propulsive undercurrent, which, he believed, the new psychoanalytic vocabulary made it possible to acknowledge. “The conflict in ‘Hamlet’ is so effectively concealed,” he wrote, “that it was left to me to unearth it.”

Later, Rothberg adds:

They [Webster and Critchley] incline toward the Freudian reading of “Hamlet,” which holds that Hamlet delays because he feels guilty. Hamlet’s problem, they argue, isn’t really that he’s hesitant about violence. Rather, it’s that the possibility of being violent fills him with shame. In “Hamlet,” they write, shame is pervasive; it has settled on Elsinore like a fog. For Freud, Hamlet’s shame has to do with his Oedipal desires. But for Webster and Critchley it’s more abstract. It has to do with the shame of needing to love, the shame about the emptiness that, they hold, is at the center of the experience of love.

House of Cards (BBC)

House of Cards is the new Netflix original series, starring the great Kevin Spacey, based, loosely, on the original BBC series of the same name. I watched both recently, and while the American version is quite good, the English version is the undisputed master.

The BBC aired House of Cards, a political thriller based on a novel by the same title, in four hour-long installments in 1990. The plot traces the machinations of the protagonist, Francis Urquhart, Chief Majority Whip in the House of Commons, as he plots a rise to Prime Minister following the deposal of Maggie Thatcher by her own Conservative party. Urquhart, ingeniously played by Ian Richardson, seduces a young reporter to spread his backstabbing gossip about his colleagues. Meanwhile, his wife, played by the wintery Diane Fletcher, aids him in his seduction so that she can consolidate her own power. Neither husband nor wife will hesitate to use blackmail on even their closest supporters if it will help further their aims. Throughout the show, Urquhart breaks the fourth wall by directly addressing the camera, much like the villains in Shakespeare’s tragedies use asides to let the audience know their own deceptions.

At this point, you’re probably thinking “Those plot points remind me of Shakespeare’s Richard III, with a dollop of Macbeth,” and I think that you’d be entirely correct with your analysis, especially if you stir in some Machiavelli.

The immense success of the series led the BBC to commission two sequels, To Play the King (1993) and The Final Cut (1995), in which Urquhart manipulates the royal family and then steals elections in order to continue as the longest-serving Prime Minister in the 20^th century. Furthermore, he’s determined to erase the Thatcher legacy (he sees Maggie as his true rival even after she’s left the political scene) so that he can secure his legacy as the most powerful Prime Minister in English history.

If you like dramas about political intrigue, or if you’re an Anglophile, then you’ll love this series. I’ll post about the Netflix series in a few days.

A break from writers?

Do you feel, as I do, that there’s just too much to read? That the stack of books (physical or electronic on your iPad) is just overwhelming? Perhaps, if we need a break so we can catch up, we should ask writers to take a year off? Or, maybe, we should pay them not to write?

How to name a character

One of my friends, the terrific story writer Tony Bukoski, sometimes uses the names of his friends as characters in his fiction as a sly practical joke. And Stephen King, among other authors, has occasionally auctioned off for charity the right to have a character named for the high bidder. Here’s a new wrinkle: Charles Salzberg, as he notes in the New York Times, is simply too lazy to come up with a bunch of names. Plus, he decides, it might help to promote his novel.

Albert Murray and John Hollander

Two extraordinary critics have died, Albert Murray and John Hollander. I've read both for years and recommend Murray on African-American literature and Hollander on the English Renaissance.

Becoming Mark Twain

A few months ago, I published the essay below in the New York Times. I’m reprinting it here with hypertext links to provide some illustrations and context. The Times will publish another of my essays about authors in the Civil War next month.

By early February 1863, Samuel Langhorne Clemens must have felt glad that he was more than 18 months removed from any direct participation in the Civil War. No longer risking his life in a guerrilla war in northern Missouri, he was a newspaper editor in the Nevada Territory, causing some local scandals with his acerbic political commentary and tall tales. Although he occasionally wrote about the war raging back East, Clemens mainly focused his columns on mocking the territorial legislature or relating humorous anecdotes about the citizens of Nevada. Surely, though, he must have sometimes thought about his own war experiences in the summer of 1861.

Commercial traffic on the Mississippi River had ceased soon after war broke out, and Clemens, then 25 years old and a steamboat pilot for two years, decided in early June 1861 to join with some friends in enlisting in the Marion Rangers, a unit of the Missouri State Guard from the Hannibal area. While his father had once owned a slave, and while he had spent many boyhood summer days surrounded by slaves on his uncle’s farm, Clemens seemed to enlist more as a lark than for any political or ideological reasons. Indeed, in the months prior to joining the Rangers, Clemens had expressed both pro-Union and anti-Union views as the states seceded and war approached. His rather flippant attitude toward the war would change, however, as the realities of army life in the field set in.

Clemens, according to a fellow recruit, showed up for the Marion Rangers riding a mule and carrying a squirrel rifle and an umbrella. Disregarding his complete lack of military experience, his comrades elected him lieutenant, which made him second in command of the dozen or so men. According to Clemens’s 1885 short memoir of his war experiences, “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed,” the Rangers would occasionally attempt a military drill, but they soon collapsed into horseplay and then forget what little they had learned. Moreover, Clemens discovered that his friends would refuse any orders that he gave, arguing that he was certainly not their superior.

Clemens also wrote in his memoir that it rained almost constantly, and that he and the men lacked any uniforms or arms and relied on local farmers for food and shelter. Every few nights, he noted, a rumor of approaching Union troops would send the Rangers, at top speed, in the direction opposite of the supposed Yankees. Those enemies never materialized, and the Rangers were soon filthy and hungry. Clemens also related one particularly tragic night-time incident when the terrified Rangers shot and killed an approaching figure on a horse they assumed to be a Union advance scout, but who turned out to be a passing stranger. (The incident is probably fictional, as no record, aside from Clemens’s own memoir, exists.)

After two weeks in the field, the Rangers heard a convincing rumor that a Union colonel, leading an entire regiment determined to destroy any Confederate irregulars in northeast Missouri, was heading toward Marion County. The Rangers quickly disbanded, with most of the men slipping back into civilian life but a few joining the regular Confederate Army. Clemens returned to relatives in St. Louis and tried to keep out of sight, since Union General John C. Frémont governed the city under martial law that threatened insurrectionists with hanging.

On July 18, 1861, about a month after the Rangers had disbanded, Clemens started west with his older brother, Orion Clemens, who had just been appointed the territorial secretary of Nevada. Clemens intended to make his fortune by mining silver, but he soon discovered that journalism was not only easier physically but also paid more regularly. By late 1862, he was a full-time newspaperman in Virginia City, and on Feb. 3, 1863, he decided to sign an article with the name “Mark Twain,” an old river expression that meant “two fathoms.” Within two years, his new name would be famous across the country, and from then on, Samuel Clemens, the erstwhile Confederate, would be known as Mark Twain.

Coincidentally, some years later, Twain discovered that the commanding officer of that regiment ordered to destroy Confederate irregulars was none other than Col. Ulysses S. Grant, an ex-Army officer who had recently resumed his military career after being cashiered for drunkenness in 1854. Grant had spent the years immediately before the war in the St. Louis area, where he and his wife had reportedly socialized with William and Pamela Moffett, Twain’s brother-in-law and sister. Many years after the war, and following his presidency, Grant would begin a friendship with Twain, who would later offer his own company to publish the ex-president’s memoirs. The collaboration was a success, and “The Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant” became a bestseller in late 1885, although Grant himself died in July 1885 shortly, after completing his final draft.

In “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed,” Twain summed up his war-time experiences by writing, “And it seemed an epitome of war; that all war must be just be just that — the killing of strangers against whom you feel no personal animosity; strangers whom, in other circumstances, you would help if you found them in trouble, and who would help you if you needed it. My campaign was spoiled … I could have become a soldier myself if I had waited. I had got part of it learned; I knew more about retreating than the man that invented retreating.”

Sources: Joe B. Fulton, “The Reconstruction of Mark Twain: How a Confederate Bushwhacker Became the Lincoln of Our Literature”; Jim McWilliams, “Mark Twain in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch”; Ron Powers, “Mark Twain: A Life”; R. Kent Rasmussen, “Mark Twain A-Z: The Essential Reference to His Life and Writings”; Mark Twain, “Great Short Works of Mark Twain.”

Monkey Minds

If you’re having trouble finishing my posts, it’s probably because of your “monkey mind.” This article, by Alex Soojung-Kim Pan, explains better than I can.

Meeting Louise Erdrich

This past April, Karen Foster and I traveled to Wahpeton, North Dakota, to see Louise Erdrich receive the state's highest honor, the Roughrider Award. Louise, who won the National Book Award last year for The Round House, is one of my favorite novelists (and one I teach frequently), so it was a thrill to meet her.

Interior Places & What the River Carries

Of the many books that I read this past summer, two stand out. It’s not just because they are beautifully written (although they are), but also because they are by my friend, Lisa Knopp.

Lisa has published five collections of her essays with some of the most prestigious university presses in the country: Field of Vision (University of Iowa Press, 1996); Flight Dreams (University of Iowa Press, 1998); The Nature of Home (University of Nebraska Press, 2002); Interior Places (University of Nebraska Press, 2008); and What the River Carries (University of Missouri Press, 2012). All of her books have been well reviewed, and a few have won prizes.

Lisa’s style is consistent, for her essays are typically a blend of detailed observation, either of people or of scenes in nature, and of her own life. In a sense, her essays are memoir, but they are much richer than the typical memoir since her “field of vision” isn’t restricted to herself and her own experiences.

Interior Places is a collection of sixteen essays that, as she says in her first essay, “The Way In,” ranges over “the outer and [the] inner terrain.” Using the analogy of a geode, she argues that the exterior surfaces of many things may seem bland, but one can often find rare, even exquisite beauty on the inside.

One of my favorite essays in this collection is “Surrender,” a meditation on the necessity of submitting one’s self to the larger world and its realities. Almost Buddhist in its tone, Lisa describes how releasing a bird from her hand (a ranger had just banded it) made her realize that she had to let her grown children leave the nest that she had made for them. “’There’s the sun,’” she softly tells the titmouse, lifting her hand skywards. Then she watches as “a burst of wing beats carried the bird into the cloudless sky.”

Another equally powerful essay is “Enclosures,” which juxtaposes the depths of her personal struggles with claustrophobia with the necessity of living in the modern world, with its cars, windowless offices, and elevators. Wondering about the root causes of her phobia, she reads psychological and neurological texts to find out why people have such paralyzing fears. Ironically, she learns, many phobias (of heights, of snakes, etc.) can be a blessing.

As much as I enjoyed Interior Places, I probably liked What the River Carries even more since many of its essays center on historical figures. Like Caesar’s Gaul, Lisa’s book is divided into three parts: Mississippi, Missouri, and Platte. Each of these sections details her encounters with that particular river in the three distinct phases of her life: childhood, mid-life, later-life.

One of my favorite essays from this collection is “Restorations,” which describes how the Boyer Chute National Wildlife Refuge on the Missouri River has been restored to its “wild” state, which leads Lisa to contemplate how her son, Ian, had recently been restored to her after some time in delinquency. She explains how being in nature helped to calm her son by allowing him to express his “wild” side through hunting and fishing. She concludes, with gratitude, that her son, whom she thought she’d lost, has now found his path in life.

Two other of my favorite essays in this collection are “Mound Builders,” about the Native American tribes in the Midwest who constructed the mysterious pre-Columbian mounds, and “Little Dixie,” about the family of Jesse James. In both of these essays, like in many other essays in this collection, she describes the historic sites with the same attention to detail that she uses to describe her relationships with her family.

Lisa has spent most of the past twenty-five years in Lincoln, Nebraska, and so she has come to think of the Platte as her “home river.” Every spring she drives to the central part of the state to watch the Sandhill cranes return for a stop on the Platte as they migrate from the southern United States to northern Canada. In “No Other River,” she writes about her love for these birds and how a flourishing migration means a healthy river for future generations of cranes and crane-watchers. She closes this essay by joining in the mating ritual: “I’ll watch the dance closely enough that I can join in, bowing my head, strutting a bit, tossing sticks, and leaping high above the earth.”

Wouldn't you like to join her?

Zealot

I’ve seen Reza Aslan on The Daily Show over the years, so I knew that he was an author that I needed to check out. I didn’t find the time, however, until his latest book, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, came out earlier this summer. As I’d expected, he’s an author worth reading.

Aslan, who has degrees in creative writing as well as a master's from Harvard Divinity School and a Ph.D. in Sociology of Religions from the University of California at Riverside, begins by emphasizing that his book, the result of twenty years of research and study, is about the historical Jesus, not about the supposed son of God. In other words, Aslan is interested in finding out as much as he can about the physical man who lived some 2,000 years ago and is not interested in debating whether or not that man was a manifestation of a deity.

Judea of 2,000 years ago, Aslan points out, was aflame with Jewish rebellion against the oppressive rule of Rome. Many prophets wandered through the land, declaring themselves God, or the son of God, and trying to lead a revolt to free the Jewish people. The Romans, and the Jewish ruling class that owed its privilege to the Romans, promptly executed—usually through crucifixion—nearly all of those rebels before they could stir up too much trouble. (Crucifixion, in fact, was the punishment specifically reserved for non-citizens who espoused sedition against Rome.) A problem for any scholar of the period, however, is that almost nothing is known about any one of these prophets, including the most famous of all, Jesus of Nazareth, although a lot is known about them collectively because of the meticulous records-keeping of the Romans. Consequently, to learn about Jesus, Aslan must rely on inference based on his study of the political, economic, religious, and social conditions of that period. Aslan’s central question, then, is how did a Jewish radical, one who advocated for kneeling only to the Kingdom of God, become transformed into the son of God? How did Jesus the man become Jesus the Messiah?

Although his book is rigorously documented (his bibliography runs to sixteen pages), Aslan writes in a colloquial style for the general reader. For example, here he describes what a typical Jewish man arriving at the Temple in Jerusalem would see:

The money changers play a vital role in the Temple. For a fee, they will exchange your foul foreign coins for the Hebrew shekel, the only currency permitted by the Temple authorities. The money changers will also collect the half-shekel Temple tax that all adult males must pay to preserve the pomp and spectacle you see around you: the mountains of incense and ceaseless sacrifices, the wine libations and the first-fruits offerings, the Levite choir belting out psalms of praises and the accompanying orchestra thrumming lyres and belting cymbals.

This straightforward, unadorned style allows Aslan to make his points directly and clearly so that his book's emphasis remains on his argument, which is that Jesus was a dangerous radical who posed a threat to Rome's rule of Judea. He adds, perhaps controversially, that Jesus’s mission should be seen as a failure since, according to Jewish tradition, the messiah would be a living man, proclaimed “King of the Jews,” who would expel the Romans and restore the purity of Judea for the Chosen People. Instead, the Romans crucified Jesus and, following a large-scale rebellion forty years later, razed the Temple in Jerusalem and exiled the Jews from Judea.

Zealot is divided into three parts: Part One covers the birth and early years of Jesus and also explains the rise of zealots during these years (the term refers to Jewish nationalists, full of “zeal,” who swore strict allegiance to the Torah and vowed never to kneel before any but the One God); Part Two begins by describing Jesus’s radical acts, such as attacking the money changers at the Temple, before then explaining exactly why the Jewish and Roman authorities saw such acts as heresies against the Jewish religion and sedition against Rome; and Part Three focuses on the years immediately following Jesus’s crucifixion, in which, Aslan writes, “a failed messiah who died a shameful death as a state criminal” became transformed into “God incarnate.”

Regardless of your faith, or lack of faith, Aslan’s book is a fascinating account of life in Judea 2,000 years ago and, as such, is worth reading.

(After I wrote this review in June, Zealot sparked much controversy, especially following an inflammatory Fox News interview with Aslan).

Why Be an English major?

Why be an English major? How about that it makes you into a better person? Reason enough, don’t you think?

An excerpt from Mark Edmundson’s marvelous essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

The English major at her best isn't used by language; she uses it. She bends it, inflects it with irony, and lets hyperbole bloom like a firework flower when the time's right. She knows that language isn't there merely to represent the world but to interpret it. Language lets her say how she feels. The English major believes in talk and writing and knows that any worthwhile event in life requires commentary and analysis in giant proportion. She believes that the uncommented-on life is not worth living. Then, of course, there is the commentary on the comments. There must be, as Eliot says, a hundred visions and revisions before the taking of the toast and tea—and a few after as well.

Metacognition

Metacognition, or “thinking about thinking,” used to be one of the standard definitions for what sets humans apart from the other animals. In short, the ability to contemplate one’s own consciousness (which leads to contemplating one’s place in the universe, one's own mortality, etc.) is what makes us “human.” Recently, however, some scientists and philosophers have argued that other animals—such as apes and dolphins—show this metacognition.

At any rate, can thinking about our thinking make us into better writers, especially if it leads us to consider our experiences in new ways? Joyce Dyer, in an essay in today’s New York Times, suggests that it can.

A pilgrimage to Hannibal, Missouri

I'm going to post an essay about Mark Twain in a few days, so I thought I'd first give give you a tour of his early life. These photos are from two visits I made in the early 1990s, which is why the images aren't digital and crisp. Click the links for more information about each site.

This first photo is of the Mark Twain Birthplace State Historic Park, located on the shore of Mark Twain Lake The cabin in which he was born was actually located a few miles away, in Florida, Missouri. It was later moved to this location and housed in this "shrine."

Twain was born as Samuel Langhorne Clemens on November 30, 1835, in this cabin in the new village of Florida. Within five years, however, when it became clear that Florida was never going to thrive, Twain's father moved the family to Hannibal, approximately 40 miles away on the Mississippi River.

The marker above stands on the actual location of where the birth cabin used to stand.

If you persist, you can find the old Florida cemetery nearby. The above stone marks the grave of John Quarles, the uncle of young Sam Clemens. Sam spent many summer days on his uncle's farm, listening to the slaves tell their stories and sing their songs. One particular slave, "Uncle Daniel," may have served as a model for the character of Jim in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

The marker above, also in the Florida cemetery, is for Dr. Chowning, who delivered Sam Clemens into this world.

The Mark Twain Boyhood Home and Museum, located at 120 N. Main Street, Hannibal, is a wonderful monument to the man and his legacy. It houses many rare artifacts, including the typewriter that Twain used and the robes he wore when he received his honorary doctorate from Oxford University.

Across the street from the Boyhood Home is the Becky Thatcher Bookstore, which was actually the home of Laura Hawkins, an early girlfriend of Sam's and the inspiration for the character of Becky Thatcher in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Copies of my two books about Twain are in its permanent library.

The grave of Joe Douglass, the inspiration for "Injun Joe" in Tom Sawyer, is in the Hannibal cemetery. His friends always insisted that his portrayal as a drunken, violent man was a libel.

No trip to Hannibal is complete until you've taken a trip aboard the Mark Twain. If you're daring, you might sneak into the wheelhouse. My friend and fellow Twain scholar, Rick Hill, and I posed on the stern. Rick later lamented the sad passing of Injun Joe.

A last look at Hannibal, from the bluffs known as Lovers' Leap just outside of town.