Autobiography of Mark Twain: Volume 1, Reader’s Edition (Mark Twain Papers) - Softcover

Mark Twain

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0520272250 ISBN 13: 9780520272255

Publisher: University of California Press, 2012

Synopsis

The year 2010 marked the 100th anniversary of Mark Twain’s death. In celebration of this important milestone and in honor of the cherished tradition of publishing Mark Twain’s works, UC Press published Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1, the first of a projected three-volume edition of the complete, uncensored autobiography. The book became an immediate bestseller and was hailed as the capstone of the life’s work of America’s favorite author.

This Reader’s Edition, a portable paperback in larger type, republishes the text of the hardcover Autobiography in a form that is convenient for the general reader, without the editorial explanatory notes. It includes a brief introduction describing the evolution of Mark Twain’s ideas about writing his autobiography, as well as a chronology of his life, brief family biographies, and an excerpt from the forthcoming Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 2―a controversial but characteristically humorous attack on Christian doctrine.

About this title

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

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.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0520272250
• ISBN 13: 9780520272255
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 414
• Editor: Harriet E. Smith, Benjamin Griffin, Victor Fischer, Michael B. Frank, Sharon Goetz, Leslie Diane Myrick