Biography | Mark Twain — The Hartford House Where Tom and Huck Were Written

People treat Huckleberry Finn as a book written on the Mississippi.

The published books were finished in this house.

The Clemens family moved into 351 Farmington Avenue, Hartford, in September 1874.

Edward Tuckerman Potter designed it as a high Gothic, stick-style pile of gables, bays, and a glass conservatory.

Samuel, Olivia, and their daughters lived here until 1891.

Those seventeen years were the ones he later named the happiest of his life.

He wrote in the third-floor billiard room, at a desk faced to the wall so the table and the windows would not pull him off the page.

From that room came The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in 1876, A Tramp Abroad in 1880, The Prince and the Pauper in 1881, Life on the Mississippi in 1883, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in 1884, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court in 1889.

Parts of Huckleberry Finn were also drafted in the octagonal study at Quarry Farm, the Langdon family's summer place above Elmira.

The Hartford house remains the address of the published books.

In 1881 Louis Comfort Tiffany and Associated Artists restenciled the public rooms.

The family ruined itself on the Paige typesetter and on Charles L. Webster and Company, the publishing house that issued Huckleberry Finn and Ulysses S. Grant's memoirs.

They closed the house in 1891 and went to Europe.

It was declared a National Historic Landmark on 29 December 1962 and opened as a house museum in 1974.

Harriet Beecher Stowe's cottage stands next door.

Tours are guided.

The billiard room is still a billiard room.

Photo: Kenneth C. Zirkel, 22 November 2009, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons