Until recently, Wallace Stevens’s oeuvre has gone largely neglected in studies of urbanism in literary modernism, as his verse mostly neglects the sweeping skylines often found in the poetry of more pronouncedly urban modernists. However, as seen in recent scholarship and as Daniel’s chapter demonstrates, Stevens was profoundly influenced by modern urbanization during his formative years in New York City and often turns to understated cityscapes as fit environments for his ongoing exploration of the right aesthetic relationship between reality and imagination. This chapter offers a brief study of Stevens’s urbanization of mind before providing a close reading of two major modes of urbanization throughout his works: a “dark,” antipoetic urbanization in which city architectures prevent contact with nature and community, thereby also preventing the creation of vibrant poetry, and an organic, aesthetic urbanization where cities are sites of poetic inspiration and surprising connection with the more-than-human world. Rather than resolving this tension, Daniel proposes that Stevens’s vacillation between these two modes is itself characteristic of the multiform and often ambivalent ways the poet engaged with modern urbanism.

The four most important Mark Twain centers in America are the Mark Twain Boyhood Home and Museum, Hannibal, Missouri; the Mark Twain House and Museum, Hartford, Connecticut; the Center for Mark Twain Studies, Elmira, New York; and the Mark Twain Papers, Berkeley, California. The Boyhood Home is a restoration of the Clemens home in Hannibal, and Hannibal itself is dedicated to Twain’s life and work, especially The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The museum has artifacts from Twain’s life, as well as exhibits on the history of slaveholding in Hannibal. The Mark Twain House and Museum includes a painstakingly accurate restoration of the sumptuous Hartford mansion where Sam and Olivia Clemens raised their three daughters, as well as a museum and teaching center. The Center for Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College includes the octagonal study where Twain wrote many of his best works while spending summers with his sister-in-law, as well as a large library, and Quarry Farm, the hillside house where the Clemens family summered in the 1870s and 1880s. The Mark Twain Papers at the University of California, Berkeley houses the largest collection of Twain manuscripts, letters, and other documents, with editors who continue their work of producing definitive editions of Twain’s works. The center also welcomes scholars for research in the archives.

Samuel Clemens was born in 1835 in Missouri. He spent his childhood by the Mississippi River in Hannibal, Missouri. He was a printer’s apprentice, then was a journeyman printer, then earned a pilot’s license on the Mississippi River. He went west to Nevada, avoiding the Civil War, then became a newspaper writer. In February 1863, he signed an article with the pen name “Mark Twain,” beginning the creation of his alter ego. His 1867 trip to Europe and the Holy Land led to his travel book The Innocents Abroad. Upon his return to America, he met Olivia Langdon in Elmira, New York, and they married in 1870. A son, Langdon, died in infancy, but Sam and Livy had three daughters: Susie, Clara, and Jean. Most summers were spent in Elmira, where Twain composed many of his most famous works, including The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He turned his attention to business adventures, including starting his own publishing company, but also a series of investments, most of which ended in failure. In his last decade, he increasingly spoke out about politics. He died in 1910, his popularity assured by his works and his public persona.