Kerry Driscoll, “A Delicate Balance: Work and Play in Mark Twain’s Creative Process”

Presented on October 15, 2025 in the Quarry Farm Barn as part of the 2025 Fall Trouble Begins Lecture Series.

The Trouble Begins Lecture Series and the Park Church Summer Lecture Series are made possible through the generous support of the Mark Twain Foundation.

Although Mark Twain published over twenty books during his lifetime—in addition to countless short stories, sketches, and essays—he nonetheless repeatedly maintained that he was essentially a “lazy” man. Speaking to a New York Times reporter on the cusp of his 70th birthday in 1905, for example, Twain insisted that he “had not done a day’s work in all [his] life,” explaining, “What I have done…was play. If it had been work I shouldn’t have done it.” This talk, featuring archival photographs and manuscripts from the Mark Twain Project, examines the concepts of “work” and “play” in terms of the writer’s creative process and prolific literary output. Specifically, it explores the physical conditions and circumstances Mark Twain found most conducive to the expression of his artistic genius—from his Quarry Farm study in Elmira, NY to a rented room atop a mountain in Heidelberg, Germany, and culminating in the comfort of his elaborately carved Venetian bed.

This talk—which features archival photographs and documents from the Mark Twain Papers at Berkeley—explores the physical environs Mark Twain found most conducive to the expression of his artistic genius—from his Quarry Farm study to a rented room atop a mountain in Heidelberg, Germany, and finally, the comfort of his own bed.

Kerry Driscoll, Professor of English Emerita at the University of Saint Joseph (West Hartford, CT) is currently Associate Editor at the Mark Twain Papers and Project at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of MARK TWAIN AMONG THE INDIANS AND OTHER INDIGENOUS PEOPLES (University of California Press, 2018), the first book-length study of the writer’s evolving views regarding the aboriginal inhabitants of North America and Australasia, and his deeply conflicted representations of them in fiction, newspaper sketches, and speeches. She is past president of the Mark Twain Circle of America as well as a contributing editor to its journal, the MARK TWAIN ANNUAL. In 2022, she received the Circle’s Louis J. Budd award for distinguished scholarship in recognition of her groundbreaking research.