The Center for Mark Twain Studies (CMTS) at Elmira College will host the final of three lectures on August 16. Part of the 2023 Park Church Summer Lecture Series, the talks are held at the historic Park Church at 208 W. Gray Street. They offer a chance to visit a site where Twain and his family were loyal congregants while engaging in a lively discussion. Each lecture begins at 7:00 p.m. and is free and open to the public.

At the August 16 talk, Stephen Rachman, Associate Professor in the Department of English at Michigan State University will discuss Samuel Clemens and Mark Twain’s preoccupations with money. Titled “The Monetary Imagination of Mark Twain: From the Nevada Mines to the £1,000,000 Bank-Note,” Rachman will focus on the role money played in Twain’s creative life, his inventive use of language, his critiques of culture and politics and race, and the deeper imaginative patterns that shaped his work. This talk will cover the full span of Twain’s works to demonstrate his obsessions with money and speculation, but also show how he came to use his imaginative powers in monetary terms, the coinage of his brain, circulating like currency throughout his work.

If you missed the earlier lectures, you can find descriptions and recordings of each here.

The Park Church Lecture Series is sponsored by CMTS and Park Church. They and The Trouble Begins series are made possible by the support of the Mark Twain Foundation, Katherine Roehlke, and generous gifts from individual donors.

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