An Assassin in Utopia with Susan Wels and Ellen Wayland-Smith (Virtual)

An Assassin in Utopia tells the true, interlocking stories of the Oneida Community—a free-love community in upstate New York—and its radical founder, an eccentric newspaper publisher, President James Garfield, and a one-time member of the Oneida Community—Charles Julius Guiteau—who assassinated him. 

Set against a vivid backdrop of ambition, hucksterism, epidemics, and spectacle, the book’s interwoven stories fuse together in the climactic murder of President Garfield—at the same time as the Oneida Community collapsed. Colorful and compelling, An Assassin in Utopia is an odyssey through America’s nineteenth-century cultural and political landscape.  

 Virtual: $5 non-members and members. REGISTER HERE. 

 Copies of An Assassin in Utopia are available for purchase through the Mark Twain Store; proceeds benefit The Mark Twain House & Museum. Books will be shipped after the event. We regret that we are NOT able to ship books outside the United States as it is cost-prohibitive to do so. 

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 About the Author: Susan Wels is a bestselling author, historian, and journalist. Her Titanic: Legacy of the World’s Greatest Ocean Liner spent fourteen weeks on the New York Times bestseller list; the book was also a Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and USA Today bestseller. Her work has received press coverage in PEOPLE, Smithsonian’s Air & Space Magazine, the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Francisco Examiner, and the San Jose Mercury-News among many other journals.  Wels’s work as a historian includes her acclaimed San Francisco: Arts for the City as well as her research on the role of women at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. Wels and her husband divide their time between the San Francisco Bay Area and their farm in the south of Chile. 

 About the Moderator: Ellen Wayland-Smith is an associate professor of writing at the University of Southern California. She is the author of Oneida: From Free Love Utopia to the Well-Set Table and The Angel in the Marketplace: Adwoman Jean Wade Rindlaub and the Selling of America. _____________________________________________________________ 

 Programs at The Mark Twain House & Museum are made possible in part by support from CT Humanities; the Connecticut Department of Economic and Community Development, Office of the Arts; Ensworth Charitable Foundation, Bank of America, N.A., Trustee; the Greater Hartford Arts Council’s United Arts Campaign; The Hartford; The Mark Twain Foundation; The National Endowment for the Humanities; and Travelers.