Mark Twain House

As a nationally recognized Mark Twain scholar, Dr. Chadwick is the author of The Jim Dilemma: Reading Race in Huckleberry Finn.

This academic work has taken Chadwick to the White House, to participating at the Mark Twain House, and in television features and documentaries including NBC's Dateline, PBS's Born to Trouble: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Ken Burns' Mark Twain.

In 2015, Chadwick was elected vice president for the National Council of Teachers of English.

She earned a BA from the Houston Baptist University, her MA and PhD in American and British Literature and Classical and Modern Rhetoric from Texas Woman's University, and completed a PhD residency at the University of London.

Mm-hmm

... and a James McBride book from that year to be the Mark Twain House prize of American Voice.

Wow.

You know, so I just...

And really, I use it a lot to get people who think they just like literary fiction and are too good for horror.

[laughs]

I'm like, "Well, this won the Mark Twain, you know, Mark Twain House Prize.

You should read it."

...

but spent most of his, like the M- like Mark Twain House is where we'd always go in Hartford for our, our school class trips and stuff.

Oh, that's cool.

So yeah, Mark, Mark Twain was very important.

And of course his greatest folly was the page compositor.

And if you ever have the chance, if you haven't been there already, go to the Twain House and Museum in Hartford and see this gargantuan thing that looks like a locomotive with nowhere to go.

And it's awe-inspiring to see how it was designed to set type one little letter at a time, to compose it, to even hyphenate and justify it, and then to redistribute all that type.

Twain had no sense of what it would take to start an industrial concern.

He said, well, I saw your thing on YouTube.

I said, what thing? And I had done a lecture on my play Oh, at the Mark Twain House Museum.

No, really? I had lectured about it to a Shakespeare society and someone filmed it and it's on YouTube.

So if you want to see.

There are two places that I cannot believe I have not been to yet.

One, I have never been to the Mark Twain House, and I feel like I-

Oh, that's right near where I grew up

... that's like I feel like amongst all my friends in Connecticut, I'm a ambassador for the state of Connecticut.

Uh, sorry, all my friends from college, I'm an ambassador for the state of Connecticut.

I've never been to the Mark Twain House, and I've never been to the Connecticut Science Center in Hartford, and I'm really hoping to take my little ones there, uh, and to experience that.

The Science Center is great.

Uh, I do the program Big Brothers Big Sisters, and, uh, I took Isaiah there many years ago.