Mark Twain Imagined the Raft and Henry Huntington Built It

Laura Skandera Trombley became the eighth president of The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens in July 2015. However, her history with the institution began much earlier. A specialist on Mark Twain, Trombley began conducting research at The Huntington as a young scholar, using rare materials in the Library to help shape her doctoral thesis.

She is the author of five books. Her most recent, “Mark Twain’s Other Woman: The Hidden Story of His Final Years,” was published in 2010. As a graduate student, she discovered the largest known cache of Mark Twain’s letters, which ultimately became the primary source material for her dissertation and her 1994 book, “Mark Twain in the Company of Women.” Her other books include “Constructing Mark Twain: New Directions in Scholarship (2002)”, “Critical Essays on Maxine Hong Kingston (1998)”, and “Epistemology: Turning Points in the History of Poetic Knowledge (1986)."