Mark Twain by Ron Powers

Author:Ron Powers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 2005-10-06T04:00:00+00:00

LIVY GAVE birth to her second daughter on the morning of June 8, after hours of severe labor pains, in the main Quarry Farm house. She was assisted by one of the pioneering women doctors of the mid-19th century, Rachel Brooks Gleason, an Elmira physician who had treated Livy’s progressive-minded parents and some of their friends. Mrs. Gleason was a year older than the first woman to graduate from an American medical school, Elizabeth Blackwell, whose admission to the Geneva (N.Y.) Medical School in 1847 was approved only because everyone there thought it was a practical joke. The infant weighed nearly eight pounds, twice the birth-weight of both Langdon and Susy, leading Sam to describe her as “colossal” and “the great American Giantess.” The parents named her Clara, in honor of Clara Spaulding. “It is an admirable child…[It] has intellect,” Clemens told the Twichells. “It puts its fingers against its brow & thinks.”15 To John Brown, he proclaimed, “I wish the nations of the earth would combine in a baby show & give us a chance to compete.”16

(Competition would have been stiff. Among the babies of 1874 who would shape the century to come, Guglielmo Marconi entered the world, and Arnold Schoenberg. Winston Churchill was born on Sam’s thirty-ninth birthday. Robert Frost emerged wailing, and Gertrude Stein, and Amy Lowell, and Charles Ives, and Harry Houdini, and the computer pioneer Thomas Watson, and the third baseman Honus Wagner.)

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