Biography of a Biographer: Searching For My Father on Mark Twain’s Farm

Biography of a Biographer: Searching For My Father on Mark Twain’s Farm

On my first night at Quarry Farm in Elmira, New York where Mark Twain and his family spent their summers beginning in 1871, I watched lighting splitting the sky above the Chemung River Valley visible through the window at the far end of the room where I was to sleep, where Twain himself might have slept, too. I had made the long drive from Rhode Island that morning through the dense September humidity to this house where I would be living alone …