Buffalo State English professor emeritus and Mark Twain scholar Thomas J. Reigstad held a signing recently in the campus bookstore for the release of his book “Scribblin’ for a Livin’: Mark Twain’s Pivotal Period in Buffalo," at the campus bookstore April 15.
The book, published in March, covers the classic American author’s life in the area, as an editor for the Buffalo Morning Express.
Reigstad first learned of Twain’s connection to Buffalo in graduate school at the University of Missouri. Intrigued, he followed it up throughout the course and longer, over a 30-year period, and found an interesting trend among the scholastic works he used in his research. It was enough for him to write several articles and, eventually, his book, which he finished in the summer of 2012.
“I found that most of the literature about Twain in Buffalo-- biographies and whatnot -- had dismissed that period of one and a half years as ‘insignificant,’” he said. “And as I poked around reading material on microfilm, and interviewing relatives of Twain’s friends in Buffalo, I found there was a totally different story.”
In fact, Twain’s time in the area was, as the title suggests, a period of change for him. Not only was his work for the Express “very lively,” as Reigstad put it, Twain also compiled a tremendous social network -- and in the centuries before there was anything like the Internet or social media.
“He made many friends over [at the Express] that became lifelong friends, long after he moved from Buffalo -- and he also made a lot of social friends, from going to the Presbyterian church, and people in his neighborhood (the Delaware District), and he kept in touch with Buffalonians all his life,” Reigstad said.
More importantly, Twain began to gravitate away from journalism, toward writing literature. He finished his travel book “The Innocents Abroad” and also began work on its prequel, “Roughing It,” in Buffalo, and realized quickly that he preferred a leisurely life of letters to the grueling full-time life of a reporter and editor. The choice was made easier when he started receiving book royalties and his wife received an inheritance from her father after his death.
“He made the decision in Buffalo to step away from journalism forever,” Reigstad said. “There was a realization that he didn’t want that 9-to-5 grind (as co-editor of the Express).”
Twain also inherited waterfront property by what is now Erie Canal Harbor from his wife after her passing, paying taxes and collecting rent on it for the last six years of his life.
“It was property that his ex-father-in-law had bought for his Elmira coal company,” Reigstad said. “The coal would be shipped up the Erie Canal or by train westward, and they dumped the coal at that property and shipped it to customers across the Great Lakes.”
Although this information is important to Twain’s success as a writer and evolution as a person, the greater academic world has neglected it, to Reigstad’s benefit.
“I think Buffalo has suffered from an inferiority complex since 1901, when McKinley was shot here, that I don’t feel is deserved,” he said, citing people’s perceptions of the weather and Anderson Cooper’s snubbing of Dyngus Day last year as some examples of the rest of the country dismissing the area as second-rate.
“It’s so typical that pop culture’s dismissal of Buffalo has carried over into scholarly dismissal,” he explained. “Decades of scholars who have written about Twain have only treated (Twain’s connection to Buffalo) superficially... so, to my great fortune, nobody ever seriously probed or explored that time. So I was able to jump into that hole and pull out some pretty illuminating stories.”
“Scribblin’ for a Livin’” is available in the campus bookstore for purchase.
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