Educator Wishes All Knew Twain, Stowe Like a Book

On a recent visit to Mark Twain’s old Victorian mansion, a junior high school student was asked if he could name a book by the classic American author and humorist.

“Sure,” the youngster responded in a serious tone. “Mark Twain wrote ‘The Adventures of Huckleberry Hound.’ ”

Elaine Cheesman, education director for the Mark Twain Memorial, used the anecdote to show how little many of today’s students know about “one of America’s most brilliant authors, and most socially insightful.”

“He’s been kind of relegated to the back shelf. There’s been a hundred years of authors, good authors, to kind of push him aside in the secondary school classroom,” she said.

Teach Same Novels

Teachers have overlooked Twain’s works in recent years, Cheesman says, and those who do assign Twain grow weary of teaching his best known novels. “They do ‘Huckleberry Finn’ to death,” she said.

Twain wrote more than 900 works, including poetry, plays, short stories, essays and speeches, Cheesman said.

In Hartford, where he rose to national attention and acclaim, Twain completed more than 100 works, “including the big ones: ‘Huckleberry Finn’ and ‘Tom Sawyer.’ ”

Cheesman hopes to revive wider interest in the works of Twain and his Hartford neighbor, Harriet Beecher Stowe, with a two-week program for teachers sponsored by the Twain Memorial and Stowe-Day Foundation.

Twain Seminar

About 10 Twain and Stowe scholars from around the country are to conduct the seminar, which runs until Friday, for 27 secondary school teachers from throughout Connecticut.

A source book for teachers, scholarly abstracts and tape-recorded excerpts from lectures are to be distributed and Cheesman vowed: “We’re going to reach the entire nation within a year.”

The public is even less familiar with the works of Stowe, whose novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” helped steel public opinion against slavery, Cheesman said.

Like Twain, Stowe was recognized as one of the nation’s greatest writers in the 19th Century and she also was devoted to social reform.

Unfamiliar With Work

But visitors to the Harriet Beecher Stowe House next door to the Mark Twain House frequently seem unfamiliar with Stowe’s greatest work.

“Very often people will come over and see statuettes of little Eva and Uncle Tom, they mistake them for Shirley Temple and Bojangles,” Cheesman said.

Mark Twain lived in Hartford from 1871 to 1891, and from 1874 he lived next door to Stowe, in the rambling Farmington Avenue building now preserved as the Mark Twain House.

“When Twain first moved next door to Stowe, she was this nation’s most prominent and best-known author,” Cheesman said. “When he left Hartford he was America’s most prominent and best-known author.”