Mark Twain House

Samuel Clemens bought land on Farmington Avenue in 1873 and hired architect Edward Tuckerman Potter to design a house as original as its owner's prose. Completed in 1874 in a flamboyant American High Gothic style — steep gables, patterned brick, asymmetrical towers — it was, in biographer Justin Kaplan's words, 'part steamboat, part medieval fortress and part cuckoo clock.' The Clemens family moved in that September and stayed for 17 years.

Those were the years that made American literature. Twain wrote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Life on the Mississippi, The Prince and the Pauper, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court here, working late in the top-floor billiards room that doubled as his study. In 1881, flush with success, the family had the interiors redecorated by Louis Comfort Tiffany and his Associated Artists.

Bad investments ended the idyll: the family left for Europe in 1891, and Twain never lived here again. But the house endured, was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1962, and now stands as one of the great American author-houses — a home that reads like a first edition.