Elmira, NY

Elmira is where Mark Twain did his best work. He married Olivia Langdon of Elmira, and for over twenty summers wrote in an octagonal study — shaped like a riverboat pilothouse — on the breezy hilltop of Quarry Farm above the town; The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn took shape there. The little study now stands on the campus of Elmira College, one of America's early degree-granting colleges for women, and Twain lies in the town's Woodlawn Cemetery, his grave a place of literary pilgrimage. The archive's stage keeps his name: the Clemens Center, the region's performing-arts hall in a restored 1925 vaudeville palace, brings orchestras, opera and Broadway to the Chemung Valley.

The town's second romance is with the air. The updrafts of Harris Hill made Elmira the "Soaring Capital of America", host of the national gliding contests since the 1930s and home of the National Soaring Museum, where the sailplanes hang like resting birds. Elmira also gave American sport a hero of quiet dignity: Ernie Davis, the first African-American winner of the Heisman Trophy, grew up here and is honoured with a statue. A river town of elms, gliders and one immortal summer resident, Elmira reads like one of Twain's better chapters.