The Mark Twain Boyhood Home & Museum will welcome Senator Claire McCaskill on Tuesday, August 24 at 4:30 p.m. Senator McCaskill will be speaking about the budget neutral bill: H.R. 1195/S. 483 to mint a Mark Twain commemorative coin and will be signing the “10 by 10” fence in support of the “10 by 10” Campaign, a grass roots effort to establish a viable endowment for the Museum. The goal is to raise $10 million by the end of 2010.

If the coin bill is passed, the Mark Twain Boyhood Home & Museum, along with the Mark Twain House in Hartford, CT, the Center for Mark Twain Studies in Elmira, NY and the Mark Twain Project at the University of California-Berkeley will benefit. Each of these sites works to preserve the legacy of America’s greatest writer.

“Mark Twain has been featured on postage stamps and many other pieces of memorabilia and it is quite appropriate for him to make his debut on a U.S. coin,” said Henry Sweets, Museum curator.

Executive director of the Museum, Dr. Cindy Lovell agreed saying, “We would love for this to happen in 2010 and are grateful to our colleagues in Hartford for spearheading the effort. Citizens who support this should let their representatives know.”

Mark Twain remains one of the most influential of all American authors even a century after his death. He was featured on the cover of Newsweek on August 9, 2010 regarding the release of suppressed sections of his autobiography. The University of California Press will publish the 740-page first volume of the autobiography in November on the 175^th anniversary of the author’s birth. The effort is part of the Mark Twain Project and Papers, which works with the largest collection of Twain papers worldwide. Housed in UC-Berkeley’s Bancroft Library, the Project has owned the documents since 1949.

The Mark Twain Boyhood Home & Museum is located at 120 North Main Street in Hannibal, Missouri. The mission of the Mark Twain Home Foundation is to promote awareness and appreciation of the life and works of Mark Twain and to demonstrate the relevance of his stories and ideas to citizens of the world.

To learn more, please call: 573-221-9010 ex. 404 or visit the website at: www.marktwainmusem.org