Samuel Clemens’ best friend – “first after Livy” – was a minister. Clemens’ deep cynicism about religious hypocrisy, and his late-life writings in which he faced the universe with great despair, would seem to make such a friendship unlikely.

But Rev. Joseph Hopkins Twichell of Hartford was indeed Clemens’s intimate friend for most of the author’s life. He provided comradeship, humor, and consolation even when the two men were locked in argument. The two families were close – Mark was “Uncle Mark” to the nine Twichell children and Joe was “Uncle Joe” to the three Clemens girls. At the end of one particularly argumentative letter, Clemens wrote: “Joe, the whole tribe shout love to you and yours.”

Clemens enjoyed the irony of this companionship: “I keep a clergyman to remonstrate against my drinking — It gives zest and increase of appetite.”

Twichell was born in Southington, Connecticut, and after graduating from Yale joined a New York regiment as chaplain during the Civil War. As Clemens wrote, “he breathed the smoke of a hundred battles” before being installed as minister in Hartford’s brand-new Asylum Hill Congregational Church in 1865.

He remained there for 47 years, along the way accompanying his friend on walks in the hills west of Hartford, on the brilliantly white roads of Bermuda, and the rugged trails of the Alps. Their life was a constant dialogue, in person and in correspondence. Describing one such walk time with Twichell, Clemens said: “We discussed everything we knew, during the first fifteen or twenty minutes, that morning, and then branched out into the glad, free, boundless realm of the things we were not certain about.”

Twichell was there for the tragedies of Clemens’s late life – the loss of daughter Susy, of wife Olivia, and of daughter Jean. And for the end of Clemens’ own time, when Twichell informed the world through the pages of a Hartford newspaper: “With all his brilliant prosperities he had lived to be a lonely, weary-hearted man, and the thought of his departure hence was not unwelcome to him.”