The Mark Twain Room

In 1990, a long-lost half of the original manuscript of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn resurfaced in an unlikely place: a steamer trunk in California. For a century, the missing first portion of Mark Twain’s manuscript was believed to have been destroyed by a printer. In truth, it had been sitting quietly in the basement of the granddaughter of James Fraser Gluck, the Buffalo Library curator who persuaded Twain to donate the draft in 1885. 

That discovery reunited the manuscript in full at the Buffalo & Erie County Public Library in 1992. It led to the creation of an entire room dedicated to Samuel Clemens, better known to the world as Mark Twain, America’s great humorist and literary revolutionary.

Today, the Mark Twain Room resembles a cabinet of curiosities, with more than 500 pieces of Twain memorabilia sprinkled throughout. There are cigars and playing cards stamped with his face, portraits, rare editions, and the restored mantel from Twain and his wife Olivia’s home in Buffalo, where he once worked as a newspaper editor. Visitors can also learn about his venture into invention: the “Memory Builder,” a board game he patented in 1892 after watching his daughter struggle to remember historical dates. And there’s even the trunk in which the manuscript was found, now resting beneath the fireplace mantel.

The heart of the collection is, of course, the Huckleberry Finn manuscript itself, often dubbed one of the greatest American novels and still the subject of debate today. Only two pages are displayed at a time, rotating monthly in the climate-controlled room. Twain's edits sprawl across the margins, his words scratched out, revised, and made “folksier” as he worked to capture a new American literary voice: realism. To stand in front of the manuscript feels like stepping inside his train of thought.

Twice a year, the exhibition changes, exploring themes like “Twain in Hollywood.” Beyond this room, the library holds other marvels: an unpublished Louisa May Alcott poem, a medieval manuscript collection, a letter written by Charlotte Brontë, and a rare complete set of Shakespeare's 17th-century folios. 

Such riches reflect Buffalo’s standing during the Gilded Age. The city's main street, Delaware Avenue—known as Millionaires’ Row—was lined with the mansions of leading industrialists, and Twain himself. The residue of that lavish era lives on in the treasures of the Buffalo & Erie County Public Library, a town square of culture and arts that was fundamental to the city's cultural development.