Is Mark Twain in Heaven?

Mark Twain wrestled with God and the great issues of life, death and eternity in a way only revealed when his suppressed writings were published many decades after his death.

As he evolved from pious suitor, when he first came to Hartford in the 1860s, to semi-respectable churchgoer while he lived here, to bitter cynic at the end of his life, Twain’s attitude toward Creation and any Creator who happened to be around ebbed and flowed. In agonies at the death of beloved wife, Livy, in 1904, he declared God “only a grotesque & brutal dream.”

Now the writer Susan Campbell, who has brilliantly described her own evolution from devout, Bible-studying fundamentalist to devout, Bible-studying feminist in her memoir "Dating Jesus" takes on her famous fellow Missourian at a talk at the Mark Twain House & Museum.

“Is Mark Twain in Heaven?” asks Campbell. “If not, why am I trying to get there?”

On Wednesday, May 26, at 5:30 pm, in “God, Fundamentalism and Mark Twain,” Campbell will explore these issues from the perspective of a woman bred in similar soil to that of the famous author – though she came from the Baptist part of the state, and he was a Presbyterian.

The event is free, and continues “The Trouble Begins at 5:30,” a new series of after-work talks on Twainian topics for general audiences with a taste for fun, adventure and the stories spawned by the great writer’s life in Hartford. The talks will take place in the Lincoln Financial Auditorium in the Mark Twain Museum Center. Wine, nibbles and conversation will precede the talk.