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Reviewed by:
  • Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1
  • Chad Rohman
Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1. Edited by Harriet Elinor Smith et al. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. 736 pages, $34.95.

When Garrison Keillor proclaimed Mark Twain’s newly published autobiography a “wonderful fraud,” he was only half right. Truthfully, only about 5 percent of volume 1 has never been published—the Mark Twain Papers & Project editors at Berkeley’s Bancroft Library promise that 40 percent of the material in volumes 2 and 3 (anticipated in 2012 and 2014) will be previously unpublished material.

Appearing one hundred years after his death as Twain ordered, and intended to coincide with the 175th anniversary celebration of his birth on November 10, 1835, the Autobiography is much more than a clever hoax. It succeeds in revealing Twain’s mercurial temperament, his intellectual range and vigor, his incredible breadth of experience, his constantly vacillating emotions, and his always imperfect self. It also contains a treasure trove of history and scholarship, testimony to Twain’s vibrant personal life and complex mind, and to the skill, precision, and passion of the Twain Papers’ editors. Its publication capped a year-long celebration of Twain milestones, including the 125th anniversary of the American publication of his masterpiece, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885). Its commercial success has been a much-needed boon to the Mark Twain Papers & Project, which has subsisted on Koret Foundation and National Endowment for the Humanities grants and private donations.

Three extant scholarly abridged publications of Twain’s autobiographical writings date back to the 1920s. A more recent version, Mark Twain’s Own Autobiography (1990), edited by the late Michael J. Kiskis, offers selected chapters Twain published in 1906 and 1907 in the North American Review. But according to lead editor Harriet Elinor Smith, no version is “even remotely complete, much less completely authorial” (3). Smith, daughter of eminent Twain scholar Henry Nash Smith, has been working at the Twain Papers Project for four decades. Using clues left behind by Twain, she and her detective-like editorial team assembled the figure in the carpet of the author’s multiple failed attempts to start and finish his autobiographical musings. For the first time, those musings are together in the sequence Twain intended.

Among its 700-plus pages, of which the autobiography itself comprises 467, are meticulously researched entries and apparatus: an expansive 58-page introduction, 16 pages of black-and-white photographs, selected manuscript facsimiles, 198 pages of explanatory notes and appendixes, a massive references list, and an index. If that is not enough, an expanded version of volume 1 with the complete textual apparatus is available at the Mark Twain Project Online (marktwainproject.org). [End Page 439]

If Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography can by rightly accused of self-promotion, Twain’s is culpable of self-indulgence. Written in pieces over four decades, then dictated in more pieces late in his life to various stenographers, including Josephine S. Hobby, the Autobiography is a mixed bag, quotidian facts intertwined with various personal and professional recollections—some interesting, some not. Twain’s organically arranged verbal meanderings show he always was an imperfect judge of others and himself.

He inadequately recalls some of the places and people who affected his creative processes like the feckless James Lampton, his mother’s favorite cousin who would become the model for the slick Colonel Sellers in The Gilded Age (1873). While growing up in Missouri, young Samuel Clemens spent many summers at his uncle John A. Quarles’s farm, a “heavenly place for a boy” (210); there he would come to know a black slave and raconteur called Uncle Dan’l, the model for Jim in Huckleberry Finn. And when Twain recounts his admiration and distain for President Theodore Roosevelt’s impulsivity, a known Twain trait, we seem to see the author himself: “His [Roosevelt’s] trouble is that his newest interest is the one that absorbs him … but everybody recognizes the generosity of the intention and they admire it and love him for it” (259–60).

The Autobiography’s most interesting entries are of Twain’s family. When he writes of a prophetic and despairing dream about his younger...

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