ELMIRA, N.Y. — "MARK TWAIN NEXT RIGHT'' read the sign by the cemetery gates, as if a grave could be a street address. Obediently, I made the turn and drove along a narrow lane shaded by brilliant yellow maples and dark-green fir trees, wondering how I'd recognize the famous resting place.
A granite steamboat, perhaps, to recall the author's early days on the Mississippi? A statue of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, his most famous characters? Or maybe a bust of himself, with his big mustache and thick curly hair frozen in bronze?
I found nothing like that — only dignity and calm.
America's most American writer lies in a family plot on a gentle hillside, beside his beloved wife, Livy, surrounded by the graves of their children and her relatives — all under simple, matching headstones.
The name on his marker is the one he was born with, Samuel L. Clemens. The pen name we know him by — which he once claimed to detest — gets second-billing below.
For me, these quiet graves were the end of a quest I hadn't planned on making. I'd always been a Hemingway fan, with runner-up passions for Robert Louis Stevenson and the Bronte sisters.
But this year — the 100th anniversary of his death — I've been immersed in Mark Twain. I've been reading almost nothing but his abundant travel writing, with side trips into biographies about him, when I needed a break.
It has felt like living with the man, and his writing is so prolific and varied — and his life so preposterously colorful — that I now wonder how I could have cared about anyone else.
I like literary pilgrimages in general, so I'd already visited his preserved homes:
The little frame house in the Mississippi River town of Hannibal, Missouri, where he spent his boyhood.
The fantastical mansion he built for his family in Hartford, Conn., when Mark Twain's books had made Sam Clemens rich.
And, this October, Quarry Farm, his sister-in-law's country home on a hill overlooking Elmira, south of the Finger Lakes in upstate New York's softly rolling hills.
ReadMore:Literary pilgrimage: How I discovered Mark Twain
Literary pilgrimage: How I discovered Mark Twain
