Shifting from Clemens’s comical letters, speeches and short pieces to his classic, we get a sense of the depth he brought to his work. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was composed largely at Quarry Farm, Olivia Clemens’s sister Susan Crane’s farm in Elmira, New York. The family spent most of their summers there during the time they lived in Hartford, and Crane had built a study for her brother-in-law high on a hill overlooking the farm and the city. Continue reading from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Tag Archives: Rural Life
Country Fire
“Country Fire,” first published in The New Yorker (October 1, 1938), is an event-driven short story that seems to prefigure Gill’s later interest in architecture and preservation as well as his personal reckoning with a New York/Connecticut divide. While there are many people in the story, the only character that is developed is the community of this Connecticut country town, in amalgamation. If there is an antagonist other than the fire, it is the New Yorkers and the architect lurking in the outskirts of the town’s consciousness. Continue reading Country Fire