Nook Farm

Mark Twain lived his most creative and happy years in Hartford's literary colony Nook Farm, where his neighbours and friends included Harriet Beecher Stowe, Isabella Beecher Hooker, Charles W. Warner, and other persons once well known. This is a readable social and intellectual history of a close-knit group of cultivated families, whose experience vividly exemplifies the difficulties and discoveries of the changing world of the 1870's and 1880's. Kenneth Andrews gives a lively and penetrating account of the religious experience of Mark Twain and his friends and of their day-to-day life and social and political ideas, and evaluates their writings in terms of their difficult adjustment to their times.