IV.

Settling in Hartford

With help from Jervis Langdon, his prosperous father-in-law, Twain bought an interest in the Buffalo, New York Express, intending to make journalism his career. The venture proved unhappy. Jervis Langdon died of cancer, and the Twains’ son, Langdon, died in infancy. In 1871 the couple moved to Hartford, Connecticut, where their three daughters were born: Suzy in 1872, Clara in 1874, and Jean in 1880. Much of Twain’s best work was written in the 1870s and 1880s in Hartford or during the summers at Quarry Farm, near Elmira, New York.

After publishing Roughing It (1872), an account of his early adventures as a miner and journalist, Twain wrote his first novel, The Gilded Age (1873), in collaboration with Charles Dudley Warner. Although not entirely successful, the book nevertheless contains some sharp and revealing insights about American political life in the 1870s. That period in United States history has often been called the Gilded Age in recognition of the novel’s accurate representation of a time of greed, wealth, and corruption.