Anson Burlingame (November 14, 1820 – February 23, 1870)

Twain bench with Mark Twain quote at Anson Burlingame Monument

Twain bench at Anson Burlingame Monument in Washington Park

“On Wednesday, in St. Petersburg, Mr. Burlingame died after a short illness. It is not easy to comprehend the exceeding magnitude of the loss which mankind sustains in this death, the loss which all nations and all peoples sustain in it. For he had outgrown the narrow citizenship of a state and become a citizen of the world; and his charity was large enough and his great heart warm enough to feel for all its races and to labor for them.”

Mark Twain Obituary on Anson Burlingame, 1870

Join us for our Quarterly Event: 

Anson Burlingame’s Influence on Mark Twain

Sunday, Oct. 18 at 2pm

Community Center Maple Room

Anson Burlingame played an outsized but little-noticed role in making Mark Twain the writer he became. In this talk, Stanford professor and Twain scholar Shelley Fisher Fishkin will trace the history of that relationship and note the ways in which Burlingame helped  Twain become  more than “the wild humorist of the Pacific Slope.”  Mark Twain would eulogize Burlingame after his death as a “citizen of the world.”  This talk will chart how Burlingame modeled for Twain how to be a “citizen of the world” himself,  as well as a serious writer.  It will conclude by discussing Fishkin’s latest book—Jim: The Life and Afterlives of Huckleberry Finn’s Comrade— a book which demonstrates the significance  of Twain’s intervention in the cultural conversation in his world and in our own. The book will be available for sale at the event.

Shelley Fisher Fishkin is the Joseph S. Atha Professor of Humanities. Professor of English and (by courtesy) of African and African American Studies at Stanford University. In Sept. 2026, she was awarded the Twenty-Seventh Annual Susanne M. Glasscock Book Prize for her book Jim: The Life and Afterlives of Huckleberry Finn’s Comrade published by Yale University Press in 2025. This unique prize celebrates outstanding works of original, interdisciplinary humanities scholarship that appeal to both academic and wider audiences.

“Shelley Fisher Fishkin’s Jim is a remarkable feat of scholarship that exemplifies interdisciplinarity. Not only does she discuss in detail the history of enslavement, literary history of Jim the character, and important biographical details about Mark Twain, but she also provides pedagogical resources, performance histories, and even a creative writing adaptation of Huckleberry Finn from Jim’s perspective. With all of these, Fishkin has provided comprehensive new understandings about Jim that readers from any angle would enjoy from high schoolers first encountering Jim to English professors who had studied the character extensively. Fishkin has done something so comprehensive and new that it will inevitably make an immense mark on Twain studies and set the standard for what interdisciplinary humanities scholarship should be.” – Final Selection Committee Judge