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The public is invited to attend the fall 2023 The Trouble Begins Lecture Series, presented by the Center for Mark Twain Studies and supported by the generous donations of The Mark Twain Foundation. The free lectures will kick off at 7:00 p.m., Wednesday, Oct. 4 in the Barn at Quarry Farm with a presentation by Nathaniel Williams of the University of California, Davis.
Entitled “Mark Twain and Kenneth Robeson: Missouri Writers of Two Generations,” the lecture compares the successful careers of Samuel Clemens and Lester Dent, who both came from Missouri and donned pseudonyms. While both were popular authors with lucrative careers, their models of authorship differed in many ways. Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, wrote his works and owned his characters. Dent, better known as Kenneth Robeson, represents the subsequent generation’s mass-production standard of authorship: formulaic fiction written by multiple authors under the same pseudonym featuring a character owned by the conglomerate rather than an individual creator. Williams contends that today’s age of franchise fiction more closely resembles the world of Dent than Twain.
Williams is the author of Gears and God: Technocratic Fiction, Faith, and Empire in Mark Twain’s America and Associate Editor for The Mark Twain Annual. His articles have appeared in American Literature, Utopian Studies, The Cambridge History of Science Fiction and elsewhere. He is a continuing lecturer for the University Writing Program at the University of California, Davis. He is currently writing a book on The Shadow and Doc Savage series’ role in defining franchise fiction in the twentieth century.
This year’s series includes a special presentation on Thursday, November 30, by Barbara Snedecor. Entitled “Gravity – A Conversation,” Snedecor will have a conversation with Dr. Matt Seybold, Associate Professor of American Literature and Mark Twain Studies; Director of Media Studies, Communications, and Design; and Resident Scholar at the Center for Mark Twain Studies.
Snedecor served for many years as Director of the Center for Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College and recently edited a volume of selected letters by Mark Twain’s wife, Olivia Louise Langdon Clemens.
The 2023 Fall Trouble Begins Lecture Series Schedule. All lectures are free and open to the public.
7:00 p.m., Wednesday, Oct. 4, at the Barn at Quarry Farm: “Mark Twain and Kenneth Robeson: Missouri Writers of Two Generations” by Nathaniel Williams of the University of California, Davis
7:00 p.m., Wednesday, Oct. 18, at the Barn at Quarry Farm: “‘The Wickedest Man in New York?:’ Mark Twain and the 1868 Water Street Sham Revival” by Robert E. Cray of Montclair State University
7:00 p.m., Wednesday, Oct. 25, at the Barn at Quarry Farm: “Mark Twain and the Civil War Memoir Boom” by Stephen Cushman of the University of Virginia
7:00 p.m., Thursday, Nov. 30, Peterson Chapel in Cowles Hall on the Elmira College campus: “Gravity — A Conversation” by Barbara Snedecor in conversation with Matt Seybold, Elmira College Center for Mark Twain Studies
In 1984, the Elmira College Center for Mark Twain Studies initiated a lecture series, The Trouble Begins at Eight lecture series. The title came from the handbill advertising Mark Twain's October 2, 1866 lecture presented at Maguire's Academy of Music in San Francisco. The first lectures were presented in 1985. By invitation, Mark Twain scholars present lectures in the fall and spring of each year, in the Barn at Quarry Farm or at Peterson Chapel in Cowles Hall on Elmira College's campus. All lectures are free and open to the public.