38. Princeton would suit me as well
as Heaven, better in fact, for I shouldn’t
care for that society up there.
–Mark Twain
Photo
courtesy of the Office of Communications
Photo
by Dino Palomares
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, also known as Mark Twain, visited Princeton in the early 1900s and considered moving to the area. Well-established as an author and sardonic humorist, he wrote this comment to his friend Laurence Hutton, a former editor at Harper’s Magazine who was then a lecturer in English literature at Princeton University. The Laurence Hutton Life and Death Mask Collection in Firestone Library, perhaps the world’s finest collection of such objects, is named for its original owner.