Twain scholar Michael J. Kiskis opens this fascinating new exploration of Twain with the observation that most readers have no idea that Samuel Clemens was the father of four and that he lived through the deaths of three of his children as well as his wife. In Mark Twain at Home: How Family Shaped Twain’s Fiction , Kiskis persuasively argues that not only was Mark Twain not, as many believe, “antidomestic,” but rather that home and family were the muse and core message of his writing.   Mark Twain was the child of a loveless marriage and a homelife over which hovered the constant specter of violence. Informed by his difficult childhood, orthodox readings of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn frame these canonical literary figures as nostalgic—autobiographical fables of heroic individualists slipping the bonds of domestic life.   Kiskis, however, presents a wealth of biographical details about Samuel Clemens and his family that reinterpret Twain’s work as a robust affirmation of domestic spheres of life. Among Kiskis’s themes are that, as the nineteenth century witnessed high rates of orphanhood and childhood mortality, Clemens’s work often depicted unmoored children seeking not escape from home but rather seeking the redemption and safety available only in familial structures. Similarly, Mark Twain at Home demonstrates that, following the birth of his first daughter, Twain began to exhibit in his writing an anxiety with social ills, notably those that affected children.   In vigorous and accessible descriptions of Twain’s life as it became reflected in his prose, Kiskis offers a compelling and fresh understanding of this work of this iconic American author.  " Twain's characters are often interpreted an individualists fleeing civilizing forces. Even in biographical criticism, Twain's increasing reliance on his family is seen as a threat to his iconoclastic voice. Pushing back against these dominant readings, Kiskis argues that domesticity and community are of primary importance in Twain's later works, especially in his novels between 1876 and 1894." — American Literature Michael J. Kiskis was the coeditor of Mark Twain's Own Autobiography and Constructing Mark Twain . Gary Scharnhorst is the author of Bret Harte: Opening the American Literary West and the editor of Mainly the Truth: Interviews with Mark Twain . Laura Skandera Trombley is the author of Mark Twain’s Other Woman and Mark Twain in the Company of Women  as well as a coeditor of Constructing Mark Twain. Mark Twain at Home How Family Shaped Twain's Fiction By Michael J. Kiskis The University of Alabama Press Copyright © 2016 University of Alabama Press All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-0-8173-1915-1 Contents Foreword: Michael Kiskis, the "I," and Domesticity Laura Skandera Trombley, Introduction, Chapter One Embracing Domesticity: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Chapter Two Horace Bushnell and Huck: Christian Nurture and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Chapter Three Children of the Urban Poor: Tom Canty and Edward VI, Chapter Four A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Household and the Tragedy of Valet de Chambre, Conclusion: Sam Clemens' Haunted Home, Afterword Gary Scharnhorst, Notes, Index, CHAPTER 1 Embracing Domesticity The Adventures of Tom Sawyer I ain't doing my duty by that boy, and that's the Lord's truth, goodness knows. Spare the rod and spile the child, as the Good Book says. I'm a laying up sin and suffering for us both, know. He's full of the ol' Scratch, but laws-a-me! he's my own dead sister's boy, poor thing, and I ain't got the heart to lash him, somehow. — Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer Samuel Langhorne Clemens and Olivia (Livy) Louise Langdon were married in the parlor of the Langdon family home in Elmira, New York, on February 2, 1870. On February 3, they were safely settled in Buffalo, New York, in a house that was a gift from Livy's father. Clemens was beginning what he assumed would be a long career as a newspaper editor and publisher; with help from his father-in-law, he had become part owner of the Buffalo Express in August 1869. That plan would be drastically changed within a year, when the Clemenses would leave Buffalo for Elmira and then Hartford, their pleasure with Buffalo ruined by the death of Livy's father, Jervis Langdon, in August 1870, as well as the premature birth of the Clemenses' son Langdon that November. The child remained sickly, and Livy's long bout with typhoid fever in February 1871 left her prostrate, already drained by the deaths of her father and a friend, Emma Nye, who had died in September 1870 while staying with the Clemenses. In the days after the wedding, however, Clemens was aglow with the promise of his new life. After receiving a letter from Will Bowen, a childhood friend and companion from Clemens' Mississippi days, Clemens sat down with pen and paper on the afternoon of February