Membership certificate awarded to the highly regarded American songwriter best known for the musical Showboat and for such standards as “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes."

1 page, with a woodcut image at the head and printed and manuscript text reading in full: "This is to certify that Jerome Kern of Beverly Hills, California [handwritten] is a CHARTER MEMBER of the MARK TWAIN ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA Founded June 21, 1941 at Hazelden Farm, the Home of GEORGE ADE Brook, Indiana" and signed in ink "George Ade" (President) and "George Hiram Brownell" (Executive Director)" and with raised blindstamp lower left. In an attractive red, white, and blue frame measuring 6 x 9 inches (15.5 x 23 cm). In fine condition, from the collection of Jerome Kern by descent to his daughter Betty Kern Miller and by descent through her estate.

This membership grew from the composer's engagement with Twain in his "Portrait for Orchestra: Mark Twain" composed in the same year. André Kostelanetz commissioned a series of portraits for orchestra from the composers Jerome Kern, Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson. The choice of subject was apparently Kern's and the first book he ever read was, he said, “Huckleberry Finn.” In this portrait he touches on four aspects of the author's life and in an interview, he once explained what he had tried to capture in each movement and he ended with this observation: "If you can't remember all that, just keep thinking of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn-that's always a good idea anyway.” 

George Ade (1866 – 1944) was an American writer, syndicated newspaper columnist, librettist, and playwright who gained national notoriety at the turn of the 20th century with his "Stories of the Streets and of the Town", a column that used street language and slang to describe daily life in Chicago, and a column of his fables in slang, which were humorous stories that featured colloquial vernacular speech and the liberal use of capitalization in his characters' dialog. Ade's fables in slang, using a writing style similar to Mark Twain's, gained him wealth and fame as an American humorist, as well as earning him the nickname of the "Aesop of Indiana".