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Lowe, Hillary. "Literary destinations: Mark Twain’s Houses and Literary Tourism," American Studies, University of Kansas, 2010. Advisor: Cheryl Lester
Mark Twain has been commemorated for nearly 100 years at house museums. His birthplace in Florida, Missouri, his boyhood home in Hannibal, Missouri, his adult home in Hartford, Connecticut, and his summer retreat at Quarry Farm in Elmira, New York have celebrate very different versions of the most iconic of American writers. This study examines the institutional and interpretive histories of these four houses to illustrate how our memory of Twain has been shaped by sites of literary tourism.
At each museum, staffs have struggled to balance Samuel Clemens’s biography with his literature and mythic persona. Though these sites provide access to the famous homes that are associated with Clemens, they are mediated objects. The houses cannot display Clemens’s domestic life without managerial interpretation. Clemens’s birthplace, for example, has long been the subject of disputed authenticity. His boyhood home has, until very recently, substituted Tom Sawyer’s story for Hannibal’s history. His adult home is a Gilded Age museum that so perfectly recreated the “Mark Twain period,” it overlooked Twain’s literary contributions. Quarry Farm is a Twain scholar’s paradise that allows visitors to write and live where Clemens did.
Mark Twain’s houses are places where local people have contributed to his popular canonization through preservation efforts and tourism. Clemens’s place in the American canon was uncertain at the founding of three of these four sites. These house museums, in the end, may have done as much for Clemens as he did for them. However, to remain viable, literary museums have to articulate a connection to a literary text, to a specific writerly space, or to an atmosphere that was particular to the writer’s literary production. They create a relationship between authors, texts, and tourists. This study explores how visitation to and preservation of literary places influence the way we remember authors.
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