The Hannibal Lecture: Twain Museum Tells All

Now, said the museum's executive director, Regina Faden, "we're trying to create a balance where we're talking about the fictional but really looking at the factual."

Artifacts are sprinkled throughout the museum -- such as an engaging, undated portrait of Twain by obscure New York state artist Andrew Zylinski, 15 original Twain-related Norman Rockwell paintings and several Twain personal effects, including a pipe and a top hat. But to a great degree the curators simply let the words of Twain speak for themselves. The displays are interspersed with poignant and playful quotations from Twain's "Chapters From My Autobiography," which originally was published in 25 installments in North American Review a few years before the author died in 1910.

"I would never dream that I could see things or say things better than he could himself," Faden said. "So, we use his own words."

Listen to the author -- born Samuel Langhorne Clemens -- tell of how his financially strapped parents fled Tennessee and headed northwest in the 1830s with his five older siblings in tow: "My father's fortunes were wrecked. . . . He gathered together his household and . . . at last pitched his tent in the little town of Florida, Monroe County, Missouri. He 'kept store' there for several years but had no luck, except that I was born to him" there on Nov. 30, 1835.

And of how Samuel, as the sixth of seven children, "was postponed -- postponed to Missouri. Missouri was an unknown state and needed new attractions."

And of how, when he and his slave-owning family moved to Hannibal when he was 3, it was an unsanitary, disease-ridden, racially stressed town in which "everybody was poor and didn't know it."

In the boyhood home itself, the rooms are behind glass. In toto, the house does not effectively transport a visitor back to antebellum Hannibal, but a displayed Twain quotation says it all: "When a man goes back to look at the house of his childhood, it has always shrunk: There is no instance of such a house being as big as the picture in memory and imagination call for."

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"The way they have it set up is really cool -- with all those words just coming at you -- it's sort of classic Mark Twain," said Minnesotan Joe Palmquist, relaxing at the Java Jive coffeehouse across the street after touring the museum. Java Jive bills itself as "The First Coffee Shop West of the Mississippi." It's a not-Starbucks cafe nestled among a bevy of art studios and mostly kitschy Twain-this-and-Twain-that shops along Main Street. Java Jive is an ideal place to catch your breath and gather your thoughts after visiting the museum.

Palmquist, 26, and his 23-year-old brother, Ben, were canoeing down the Mississippi from their home state "to salt water" past New Orleans. They had stopped overnight in Hannibal "to do the Twain thing."

"Being river rats ourselves, Mark Twain kind of symbolizes the Mississippi," Joe Palmquist said. "The spirit of the river is really alive in this town."

Sitting not far from Palmquist at the coffeehouse was Jennifer Halpin, a junior at Hannibal High School who said she rarely gets tired of all Twain, all the time in her home town: "It's kind of cool. You can read something in one of his books and then go look at the house where it happened."

That works in reverse, too. Seeing the houses of Hannibal firsthand makes a visitor want to reread the Twain classics. And that is no small feat, given Twain's definition of a classic: "Something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read."

Bill O'Brian last wrote for Travel about the Upper Mississippi.