“It’s better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than to open it and remove all doubt,” my daughter Monica said, quoting a phrase often attributed to Mark Twain, as we stepped into the great novelist’s wonderfully eccentric Connecticut home on the second day of our father-daughter road trip through New England.
We had collected a black Subaru Forester from JFK airport and set off on an unusual 2,000-mile pilgrimage through the literary heart of New England. The idea was simple enough: visit the homes of America’s greatest writers, trace the landscapes that shaped them, and see whether genius leaves any trace in the places it once inhabited. It also doubled as a search for good food and long, uninterrupted conversations on the open road.
