By an act of genius, Mark Twain is still alive, 100 years after his death.
On November 15, the first of three volumes of an autobiography he dictated during the last four years of his life will be published by the University of California Press.
For six years, a team of experts at the Mark Twain Project at Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, has been laboring over 5,000 pages of manuscript, and is now ready to present the 760-page volume. Within the next five years, the second and third volumes, each about 600 pages, will be released. Although parts of the autobiography have surfaced throughout the years, more than half of the entire work is previously unpublished.
Twain requested that the book be published a century after it was written so that he could speak his mind in complete freedom, without fear of losing his reputation or offending those he wrote about. And it does provide never-before-seen insight into Twain's thoughts. In addition to including his characteristically witty tales, Twain castigates the military and makes jabs at Wall Street tycoons.
Dictating the book also helped Twain speak freely without self-censoring. Written in a haphazard, stream-of-conscious manner, Twain proudly called the autobiography "a complete and purposed jumble." He also wrote to a friend that "The form of this book is one of the most memorable literary inventions of the ages. . . . It ranks with the steam engine, the printing press & the electric telegraph. I am the only person who has ever found out the right way to build an autobiography."
The collection is strikingly relevant, both politically and stylistically. Many are now calling Mark Twain the world's first blogger, and no doubt contemporary readers and writers will connect to his honest, blow-by-blow accounts of his thoughts.
You can read more about the autobiography on The New York Times and The Philadelphia Inquirer.
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