Get the latest tech news

Twain Dreams

The enigma of Samuel Clemens

A famous instance of this phenomenon—a specific subspecies known as “simultaneous dreaming”—supposedly happened to a person he knew well, a woman whose family was intimately attached to his own, in Elmira, New York, where his wife, Olivia “Livy” Langdon, came from, and where the Clemenses spent almost every summer for decades. She was described, when young, as “exceedingly beautiful”—the future President Garfield once stuck his head out the window of a moving train car to get a glimpse of her on the platform (he professed to have been concerned for her safety)—and she was possessed of an authentic literary streak that rendered Twain an object, in her eyes, of particular interest. During World War I, she joined the American ambulance corps in France, serving in the bandage room of the hospital in Neuilly-sur-Seine, treating “the wounded from Ypres and other devastated places.” In Buffalo, New York, she founded a “social settlement” called Mortimer House, giving embroidery and gardening classes to children, taking in strays.

Get the Android app