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Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1: The Complete and Authoritative Edition (Autobiography of Mark Twain series) by [Mark Twain, Harriet E. Smith, Benjamin Griffin, Victor Fischer, Michael B. Frank, Sharon K. Goetz, Leslie Diane Myrick]

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Mark Twain

Victor Fischer

Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1: The Complete and Authoritative Edition (Autobiography of Mark Twain series) Kindle Edition

by Mark Twain (Author), Harriet E. Smith (Author), Benjamin Griffin (Author), Format: Kindle Edition

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"I've struck it!" Mark Twain wrote in a 1904 letter to a friend. "And I will give it away—to you. You will never know how much enjoyment you have lost until you get to dictating your autobiography." Thus, after dozens of false starts and hundreds of pages, Twain embarked on his "Final (and Right) Plan" for telling the story of his life. His innovative notion—to "talk only about the thing which interests you for the moment"—meant that his thoughts could range freely. The strict instruction that many of these texts remain unpublished for 100 years meant that when they came out, he would be "dead, and unaware, and indifferent," and that he was therefore free to speak his "whole frank mind." The year 2010 marks the 100th anniversary of Twain's death. In celebration of this important milestone and in honor of the cherished tradition of publishing Mark Twain's works, UC Press is proud to offer for the first time Mark Twain's uncensored autobiography in its entirety and exactly as he left it. This major literary event brings to readers, admirers, and scholars the first of three volumes and presents Mark Twain's authentic and unsuppressed voice, brimming with humor, ideas, and opinions, and speaking clearly from the grave as he intended.

Editors:

Harriet E. Smith, Benjamin Griffin, Victor Fischer, Michael B. Frank, Sharon K. Goetz, Leslie Myrick

Print length

736 pages
Language

English
Publisher

University of California Press
Publication date

November 15, 2010
File size

7422 KB
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“Sometimes the autobiography seems Twain’s letter to posterity. At other times, reading it feels like eavesdropping on a conversation he is having with himself. . . . This first installment of Twain’s autobiography brings us closer to all of him than we have ever come before.” ― New York Review Of Books Published On: 2011-02-24

“This is a book to treasure for all friends of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.” ― Acadiana Lifestyle Magazine Published On: 2010-12-01

“Dip into the first enormous volume of Twain’s autobiography that he had decreed should not appear until 100 years after his death. And Twain will begin to seem strange again, alluring and still astonishing, but less sure-footed, and at times both puzzled and puzzling in ways that still resonate with us, though not the ways we might expect.” ― New York Times Published On: 2010-09-17

“This is a book for dipping, not plunging. Read, as Twain might put it, until interest pales, and then jump. It feels like a form of time travel.” ― New York Times/The Opinion Pages Published On: 2010-11-27

“Twain generously provides the 21st century aficionado a marvelous read. His crystalline humor and expansive range are a continuous source of delight and awe. . . . [He] has given us ‘an astonishment’ in his autobiography with his final, beautifully unorganized genius and intemperate thoughts. Pull up a chair and revel.” ― Los Angeles Times Book Review Published On: 2010-11-14

“Twain would approve!” ― Bookideas.com Published On: 2010-12-29

“Twain’s writing here is electric, alternately moving and hilarious. He couldn’t write a ho-hum sentence.” ― Library Journal Published On: 2010-09-15

“Twain's autobiography, finally available after a century, is a garrulous outpouring―and every word beguiles.” ― Wall Street Journal Published On: 2010-11-13

“Twian’s ‘Final Plan’ has been released in a truly spectacular first volume of his posthumous ‘Autobiography’.” -- Vitali Vitaliev ― Engineering & Technology Published On: 2011-02-01

“A major achevement.” ― Choice Published On: 2011-04-20

“Brimming with Twain’s humor, ideas and opinions, this is a book for anyone interested in the writer’s work and life.” ― Curledup.com Published On: 2011-01-12

“His '’whole frank mind,’ sharp and funny, is seared onto every page. A” ― Entertainment Weekly Published On: 2010-11-10

“Mission accomplished, Mr. Clemens.” -- Roger Boylan ― Boston Review Published On: 2010-11-01

“Promises a no-holds barred perspective on Twain’s life, and will be rich with rambunctious, uncompromising opinions.” ― Herald Scotland Published On: 2010-07-19

“Pure Twain at his typically discursive, rambling, and droll. . . . The bard of Hannibal still has much to say.” ― American Heritage Published On: 2010-09-01

“With the uncensored Twain finally here, we're the furthest thing from indifferent.” ― Time Magazine Published On: 2010-09-20

“The bestseller chart is awash with memoirs -- but none offer the extreme reading of the Autobiography of Mark Twain.” -- Debra Craine ― The Times Published On: 2010-10-18 --This text refers to the hardcover edition.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* In explaining his dissatisfaction with his early attempts to write his life story, Mark Twain blamed the narrowness of the conventional cradle-to-grave format: “The side-excursions are the life of our life-voyage, and should be, also, of its history.” This volume—the first of three—makes public autobiographical dictations in which Twain unpredictably pursues the many side-excursions of his remarkably creative life. Embedded in a substantial editorial apparatus, these free-spirited forays expose private aspects of character that the author did not want in print until he had been dead at least a century. Readers see, for instance, a misanthropic Twain consigning man to a status below that of the grubs and worms, as well as a tenderhearted Twain still grieving a year after his wife’s death. But on some side-excursions, Twain flashes the irreverent wit that made him famous: Who will not delight in Twain’s account of how, as a boy, he gleefully dons the bright parade banner of the local Temperance Lodge, only to shuck his banner upon finding a cigar stub he can light up? But perhaps the most important side-excursions are those retracing the imaginative prospecting of a miner for literary gold, efforts that resulted in such works as Roughing It and Innocents Abroad. A treasure trove for serious Twain readers. --Bryce Christensen --This text refers to the hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Mark Twain is his own greatest character in this brilliant self-portrait, the first of three volumes collected by the Mark Twain Project on the centenary of the author's death. It is published complete and unexpurgated for the first time. (Twain wanted his more scalding opinions suppressed until long after his death.) Eschewing chronology and organization, Twain simply meanders from observation to anecdote and between past and present. There are gorgeous reminiscences from his youth of landscapes, rural idylls, and Tom Sawyeresque japes; acid-etched profiles of friends and enemies, from his "fiendish" Florentine landlady to the fatuous and "grotesque" Rockefellers; a searing polemic on a 1906 American massacre of Filipino insurgents; a hilarious screed against a hapless editor who dared tweak his prose; and countless tales of the author's own bamboozlement, unto bankruptcy, by publishers, business partners, doctors, miscellaneous moochers; he was even outsmarted by a wild turkey. Laced with Twain's unique blend of humor and vitriol, the haphazard narrative is engrossing, hugely funny, and deeply revealing of its author's mind. His is a world where every piety conceals fraud and every arcadia a trace of violence; he relishes the human comedy and reveres true nobility, yet as he tolls the bell for friends and family--most tenderly in an elegy for his daughter Susy, who died in her early 20s of meningitis--he feels that life is a pointless charade. Twain's memoirs are a pointillist masterpiece from which his vision of America--half paradise, half swindle--emerges with indelible force. 66 photos and line illus. (Nov.) (c)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the hardcover edition.

From the Inside Flap

"Mark Twain dictated much of this book—now it is a book at last—from a big rumpled bed. Reading it is a bit like climbing in there with him."—Roy Blount, Jr.

"To say that the editors have done an extremely good job is a little like saying the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel does a good job of keeping the rain off the Pope's head. It is true but it doesn't give even a whiff of the grandeur of the thing."—Robert D. Richardson, author of Emerson: The Mind on Fire

"Mark Twain, always so blithely ahead of his time, has just outdone himself: he's brought us an Autobiography from beyond the grave: a hundred-year-old relic that yet manages to accomplish something new. It anticipates the Cubism just taking form in Samuel Clemens's last years, by exploding the confines of orderliness, sequence, the dutiful march of this-then-that. In so doing, it gives us not simply Mark Twain's life—that is the prosaic work of biographers—but the ways in which he thought of his life: in all the fragmented recollection, distraction, creation, revision and dreaming that make up the true, divinely jumbled devices we all use to recapture experience and feeling. If this prodigious and prodigal pastiche were a machine, it would be the Paige typesetter—except that it works."—Ron Powers, author of Mark Twain: A Life

--This text refers to the hardcover edition.

From the Back Cover

"Mark Twain dictated much of this book―now it is a book at last―from a big rumpled bed. Reading it is a bit like climbing in there with him."―Roy Blount, Jr.

"To say that the editors have done an extremely good job is a little like saying the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel does a good job of keeping the rain off the Pope's head. It is true but it doesn't give even a whiff of the grandeur of the thing."―Robert D. Richardson, author of Emerson: The Mind on Fire

"Mark Twain, always so blithely ahead of his time, has just outdone himself: he's brought us an Autobiography from beyond the grave: a hundred-year-old relic that yet manages to accomplish something new. It anticipates the Cubism just taking form in Samuel Clemens's last years, by exploding the confines of orderliness, sequence, the dutiful march of this-then-that. In so doing, it gives us not simply Mark Twain's life―that is the prosaic work of biographers―but the ways in which he thought of his life: in all the fragmented recollection, distraction, creation, revision and dreaming that make up the true, divinely jumbled devices we all use to recapture experience and feeling. If this prodigious and prodigal pastiche were a machine, it would be the Paige typesetter―except that it works."―Ron Powers, author of Mark Twain: A Life

--This text refers to the hardcover edition.

About the Author

Harriet Elinor Smith is an editor at the Mark Twain Project, which is housed within the Mark Twain Papers, the world's largest archive of primary materials by this major American writer. Under the direction of General Editor Robert H. Hirst, the Project's editors are producing the first comprehensive edition of all of Mark Twain's writings. --This text refers to the hardcover edition.

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00413QAFG
Publisher ‏ : ‎ University of California Press; 1st edition (November 15, 2010)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ November 15, 2010
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 7422 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Print length ‏ : ‎ 736 pages
Lending ‏ : ‎ Enabled

Best Sellers Rank: #238,400 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #385 in Biographies & Memoirs of Authors
- #674 in American Literature Criticism
- #962 in Humorous Literary Fiction

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Mark Twain
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Mark Twain is the pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835 - 1910). He was born and brought up in the American state of Missouri and, because of his father's death, he left school to earn his living when he was only twelve. He was a great adventurer and travelled round America as a printer; prospected for gold and set off for South America to earn his fortune. He returned to become a steam-boat pilot on the Mississippi River, close to where he had grown up. The Civil War put an end to steam-boating and Clemens briefly joined the Confederate army - although the rest of his family were Unionists! He had already tried his hand at newspaper reporting and now became a successful journalist. He started to use the alias Mark Twain during the Civil War and it was under this pen name that he became a famous travel writer. He took the name from his steam-boat days - it was the river pilots' cry to let their men know that the water was two fathoms deep.
Mark Twain was always nostalgic about his childhood and in 1876 The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was published, based on his own experiences. The book was soon recognised as a work of genius and eight years later the sequel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, was published. The great writer Ernest Hemingway claimed that 'All modern literature stems from this one book.'
Mark Twain was soon famous all over the world. He made a fortune from writing and lost it on a typesetter he invented. He then made another fortune and lost it on a bad investment. He was an impulsive, hot-tempered man but was also quite sentimental and superstitious. He was born when Halley's Comet was passing the Earth and always believed he would die when it returned - this is exactly what happened.
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Victor Fischer
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5 star		68%
4 star		14%
3 star		7%
2 star		7%
1 star		4%

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Lee Cronbach

Book covers, Al Capone's vault, and Twain's worst prose

Reviewed in the United States on November 9, 2016

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A big disappointment. I am a huge Twain fan, and have read almost all of his works.
I found this to be the most boring and the most badly written of Twain's books. Very useful
for a grad student or other Twain scholar, of course, and a very nice coffee table artifact -
but far from good reading, let alone great reading.
So my advice to anyone who has not read all of Twain is to get Life on the Mississippi,
Roughing It, good collections of his essays and short stories, and the Neider or Paine
versions of the autobiography - and of course Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.
These works - far better written - contain 90% of everything in the Autobiography
that would most likely interest the average reader - and omit the incredibly tedious
and lengthy accounts of his Italian villa, his after dinner speeches, family anecdotes that
are sound like they came straight from the Reader's Digest c. 1960 (how his young daughter misused big words,
etc.) and pointless anecdotes about minor luminaries of late 19th century New England and New York upper
middle class society (preachers, insurance company presidents, etc.).
What is the problem? First, Mark Twain made two faulty assumptions:
that if he dictated an autobiography, and if he interspersed comments on his current
life with memories of his past, it would make a far more interesting book than a conventionally
written autobiography. The flaws were, first, Twain is simply a better writer than he was a speaker.
When you contrast the prose style here with that of,say, Roughing It, there is no question which is
better - Roughing It shows the work of a master of American prose, the Autobiography is at best
average writing, at worst the maunderings of a semi-senile grandpa. Furthermore, he rarely
talks about his actual life, instead, gives us his comments on a gallery of minor figures - long
forgotten preachers, businessmen, and minor writers - which are of no interest to anyone
except a scholar or someone writing a dissertation on that period.
Which brings us to the second faulty assumption: Twain failed to realize that
little of what happens to someone who is over the age of 70 (when he started this project of oral
dictation) is just not very interesting. Since he spent most of his time in bed anyway, what we get is
his comments on the news (which are given in far better prose in his essays: just compare his
comments on the Philippines here with 'To a Person Sitting in the Darkness' and the difference
is obvious) and stories about the cute things his children did, various society dinners,etc.
Finally, the format is very hard to read - the book is too big to hold comfortable,
and to keep up with all those minor figures one has to flip back to the 200 pages of footnotes
at the end and then flip back to the actual Autobiography. After a while, I realized that most of the
time the information in the footnotes was of little interest - does anyone really care about John
Sklee, George Childs, etc.? - and only flipped back to it when I really wanted to know about
a particular character. However, it must be said that this does add some interest to the book -
sort of like doing a jigsaw puzzle.
While I usually read every word of a book, I found myself skipping more and more
passages, especially when Twain started including lengthy newspaper articles about long forgotten
minor scandals or club dinners, and - the last straw for me - excerpts from his daughter's
'biography' of him.
In conclusion, unless you are doing research on Twain or the period,

26 people found this helpful

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Emberweave

Excellent Publication, but use two bookmarks

Reviewed in the United States on May 20, 2016

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I have read all three volumes of Mark Twain’s autobiography and, while it was a monumental task, it was incredibly enjoyable. It really was like getting to sit and listen to the man talk. He is extremely sharp and funny. His descriptive abilities are unsurpassed. Since he knew this would not be published until a century after his death, he was not censored in his opinions. He is acerbic and funny and, I’m sure if we actually knew the people he talks about, dead on accurate. His comments about Theodore Roosevelt are hilarious. Twain’s self-awareness of his own ego and foibles also provides many humorous observations and comments.

Because it’s such a long autobiography, I’m sure the editors had a difficult time deciding when to end each volume. Volume One ends with a better sense of narrative completion than Volume Two, which ends on a more random note (I read each of these as they were published) Now that all three volumes are available, new readers won’t have to deal with the feeling of being left hanging. My only quibble with Volume Three is that I wish the Ashcroft-Lyon Papers had been inserted into the autobiography to correspond with the time they were written. As I was reading, I had wondered why there was such a huge gap in diary entries during the summer of 1909, which is explained in the introduction to the A-L Papers. I also wished that Twain’s final words were of his daughter Jean, rather than Ashcroft and Lyon. It’s a minor thing, but I thought I’d mention it.

I can’t understand the complaints from other reviewers that the writing was too long or too rambling. (stay away from Dickens!) Twain says at the very beginning that he isn’t going to do a “normal” autobiography. This is not a book to be read from cover to cover in one or two sittings. I read this book while reading other books over the course of several months. I would read two to four entries at a time and absorb what he said. I really got a feel of that era and I enjoyed the history as much as Twain’s own words. The reason why I say the reader should use two bookmarks is this: I kept one bookmark at Twain’s entries and the other bookmark at the descriptive notes in the back. I’d read one entry and the immediately read the corresponding notes. This gave me a better feel for the subject and who people were. It really enriched the reading experience.

I’m extremely impressed with the hard work that went into publishing these volumes and they do not disappoint. If you’re a fan of Mark Twain these books are totally worth it.

22 people found this helpful

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john robinson

I have been skimming to read Volume 1, since ...

Reviewed in the United States on March 14, 2015

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I have been skimming to read Volume 1, since it was first released.
Call me a glutton for punishment, but after "completing" reading this assemblage of Twain's attempts of his life's account, I retraced my steps to the Introduction of Volume 1 prepared by Harriet Elinor Smith.
My interest in reviewing the Introduction, and continuing in this literary slog forward, however seemingly awkwardly fitting the jumping back to the beginning, was based on a naïve assumption that it would be instrumental in gaining some prospective or elementary understanding of what it was, exactly, that I had just read.
Similarly, a mountain climber might examine the topography map, looking for some greater appeciation of his or her labored path, after having scaled such seemingly dizzying heights to reach, in all honesty, only a rather modest first step.
Despite my hopeful interest, it became glaringly quickly-clear that Ms Smith's own prowess with a pen is deficient.
Don't let the muddled guidance of the editor trip you up.
Persevere.
Jewels of wisdom abound in this assemblage. Accept at face value Twain's tying loose ends to form something of a steam-of-consciousness recollection of his life's remberance.
There's gold in them thar hills.......presumably more readily gleaned veins in the Volumes to follow.

2 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

Kelly

Great

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 4, 2019

Verified Purchase

A must have for fans.

alan hussey

A good read in every aspect

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 23, 2016

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I thought I knew a lot about subject but this book has extended that knowledge looking forward to volume 2

Sean3791

The Huge

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 16, 2014

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This is a book which looks great in my bookcase but honestly I wasn't able to get too far in it. But I am glad that I own it. Sometimes I am just turning it's pages and reading a few words here and there.

One person found this helpful

Amazon Customer

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 21, 2016

Verified Purchase

There are three volumes and I am pleased to have them.

Nancy Bjorgo

High-powered set of Mark Twain's Autobiography

Reviewed in Canada on May 14, 2021

Verified Purchase

The three large hardcovers that comprise the Autobiography of Mark Twain seem to be relentlessly complete. The several editors must have worked on this a long time to bring all this material together in a coherent way. Evidently, Twain worked on the material a long time himself before finally settling on what the style of the writing would be---informal, anecdotal, funny, clever, grouchy as a standup comedian, and philosophical. It would be quite a journey to read all 3 volumes. I'm settling for the first one with its 736 pages for the time being.

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