Page:In defense of Harriet Shelley, and other essays.djvu/418

 MARK TWAIN

become assured of a market for anything he might produce, and he could choose his own place and time for writing.

There was a tempting literary colony at Hartford ; the place was steeped in an atmosphere of antique peace and beauty, and the Clemens family were captivated by its charm. They moved there in October, 1871, and soon built a house which was one of the earliest fruits of the artistic revolt against the mid-century Philistinism of domestic architecture in America. For years it was an object of wonder to the simple-minded tourist. The facts that its rooms were arranged for the convenience of those who were to occupy them, and that its windows, gables, and porches were distributed with an eye to the beauty, comfort, and picturesqueness of that particular house, instead of following the traditional lines laid down by the carpenters and contractors who designed most of the dwellings of the period, distracted the critics, and gave rise to grave dis cussions in the newspapers throughout the country of &quot;Mark Twain s practical joke.&quot;

The years that followed brought a steady literary development. Roughing It, which was written in 1872, and scored a success hardly second to that of The Innocents, was, like that, simply a humor ous narrative of personal experiences, variegated by brilliant splashes of description; but with The Gilded Age, which was produced in the same year, in collaboration with Mr. Charles Dudley Warner, the humorist began to evolve into the philosopher. Tom Sawyer, appearing in 1876, was a veritable

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