Twain and Olivia Langdon corresponded throughout 1868. After she rejected his first marriage proposal, they were married in Elmira, New York in February 1870,[1] where he courted her and managed to overcome her father's initial reluctance.[36] She came from a "wealthy but liberal family"; through her, he met abolitionists, "socialists, principled atheists and activists for women's rights and social equality", including Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, and utopian socialist writer William Dean Howells,[37] who became a long-time friend.