After a week of being holed up in a hotel for a Land Trust Alliance conference, today I went out in search of Mark Twain's 19-room mansion in Hartford, Connecticut. Samuel Clemens lived happily in this house with his family, from 1874 until 1891, when he was forced to leave because of financial difficulties. 
Here was one more opportunity for me in my job to see a place I'd always wanted to see!
Twain loved his home, "Nook Farm." He wrote that these years spent with his family in this home were his happiest:
"To us, our house...had a heart, a soul, and eyes to see us with; and approvals and solicitudes and deep sympathies; it was of us, and we were in its confidence and lived in its grace and in the peace of its benedictions."
Unfortunately, no photos were permitted inside the house, but above is a photo from the internet of Twain sitting and writing in his famous bed. Today, when I saw it up close and in person, I have to admit I was in awe of the fact that everywhere I stood, Twain himself had stood, years ago.
His ornate Victorian bed was shipped to this home from Venice, and he ultimately died in this bed: he used to sit with his back to the footboard, and placed the pillows at that end of the bed, so that when he was upright in bed, he could face the expensive headboard in front of him! I marveled that I was seeing it all in person.
The house is huge: an elaborate interior staircase winds up to a third floor where Twain had his famous study/billiard room, complete with the large pool table today.
Since he lived there before central heating, there were fireplaces in every room, and intricate mantels above each of them. On the second floor, in the sitting room, the docent told us that Clemens would sit with his children in the evenings, and he would incorporate the objects resting on the mantelpiece, in the order of their appearance, into stories each night, but those stories were different every night.
The outdoor porches permit wonderful views of the hillside. Twain situated his house on this lot so that the servants' quarters actually faced the street, and the front of the house was "backwards," so that the family would have more privacy, and the views were more attractive from that side of the house.
I love Twain's writing: and outside of Ralph Waldo Emerson, I think he has the best quotations of anyone I've ever known. I always knew he had a sad life, and towards the end of his life, when he'd lost his wife, and three of his four children, he went through a "dark" phase, and his writing changed quite a bit.
But it was in this house that he wrote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Life on the Mississippi, The Prince and the Pauper, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
I spent part of today in a place that housed a man who came to change the face of American literature.
"Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die, even the undertaker will be sorry." (--Mark Twain)
