Samuel Clemens Comes West

Though not often noted, Samuel Clemens spent nearly 20 years as a journalist in California, from the 1850s to the 1870s. The Bay Area was the place where he invented his pseudonym, Mark Twain, and new Twain scholarship makes clear that his California experiences formed the roots of much of his later writing. Chicago-based impersonator Jim Post performs a biographical sketch of Samuel Clemens’s life in the Bay Area, including songs and readings from Twain’s West Coast writings.