---
title: Discover the Culture That Inspired Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson and W. S. Merwin
description: Plan a cultural week in Hawaii across Oahu, Maui and the Big Island, from Iolani Palace to Kilauea, following Twain, Stevenson, London and Merwin.
author: Dr Marina Nani (Editor-in-Chief)
date: 2026-10-26T13:25:10.688Z
updated: 2026-10-26T13:26:18.776Z
canonical: https://richtravelmagazine.com/article/week-in-hawaii-culture-mark-twain-stevenson-merwin
image: https://cdn.nanimediahouse.com/pexels-5006586.webp
categories: Food & Culture, Destinations
content_type: Feature
region: Hawaii
publication: Rich Travel Magazine
access: members
schema_type: Article
about:
  - type: Place
    name: Hawaii
---

In March 1866 a 30-year-old newspaper correspondent who signed himself Mark Twain stepped off a steamer in Honolulu. The Sacramento Union had sent him to write letters about the islands, and he stayed four months, riding horseback across lava fields, sitting in on the Hawaiian legislature and walking to the rim of Kīlauea at night to watch the crater burn. Speaking at a banquet in New York in 1889, he called Hawaiʻi 'the loveliest fleet of islands that lies anchored in any ocean'. He tried to return in 1895 on a world lecture tour, but cholera had broken out in Honolulu, and going ashore would have meant abandoning the tour. He watched the town from the deck and sailed on.

Twain was one of the first in a long line of writers who arrived in Hawaiʻi and left changed. The islands, however, had a literature long before any foreign pen arrived. Native Hawaiian scholars memorised chants, genealogies and histories across dozens of generations. The Kumulipo, a creation chant of more than 2,000 lines, traces the birth of the world from the slime of the deep ocean to the first human beings. King Kalākaua had it printed in 1889. His sister, Queen Liliʻuokalani, began translating it into English while she was a prisoner in 1895 and published her translation in 1897.

A week is enough for you to stand in the places where that story was lived and written. This route covers three islands: Oʻahu for the kingdom, Maui for the mountain and the poet, and Hawaiʻi Island for the volcano and the sacred sites of the Kona coast. Inter-island flights take less than an hour, so you lose very little time in the air.

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