Overview

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 The strict instruction that many of these texts remain unpublished for one hundred years meant that when they came out, he would be dead, and unaware, and indifferent, and that he was therefore free to speak his whole frank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 marked the one hundredth anniversary of Twain's death. In celebration of this important milestone, here, for the first time, is Mark Twain's uncensored autobiography, in its entirety, exactly as he left it. This major literary event offers 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.

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9781504662116

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Reviews

[Twain's] vision of America--half paradise, half swindle--emerges with indelible force. -- Publishers Weekly (starred review) A rambling walk through history with a man uniquely situated to recount it...Whenever Twain takes off on one of his creative flights, Gardner has no difficulty keeping up with him. -- SoundCommentary.com (starred review and Editor's Pick of the Month, December 2010) Dip into the first enormous volume of Twain's autobiography that he had decreed should not appear until one hundred 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 Grover Gardner's reading of Mark Twain's autobiography is something of a marvel, considering how little he relies on the Mark Twain manner made so famous by Hal Holbrook. Easy, natural, unaffected, but cued to every element of Twain's subtle and exacting prose, Gardner's delivery makes it easy to imagine you're listening to the author himself...This fine audio production has immense scholarly value. Gardner's skilled reading of a dictated text brings us as close as we might come to the author's natural voice--and reveals how much more he achieved when he applied himself at his desk. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award. -- AudioFile 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., American author and humorist 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' 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 Promises a no-holds-barred perspective on Twain's life and will be rich with rambunctious, uncompromising opinions. -- Herald (Glasgow) This first of three volumes of Twain's autobiography, published as part of the Mark Twain Project, blows away all previous editions...Veteran narrator Grover Gardner adeptly presents the material; his delivery of the German tongue-twisters in particular are a treat. -- Library Journal audio review 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 Twain's writing here is electric, alternately moving and hilarious. He couldn't write a ho-hum sentence. -- Library Journal (starred review)

Author Information

Mark Twain is the pseudonym of American writer and humorist Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835-1910), whose best work is characterized by broad, often irreverent humor or biting social satire. Twain's writing is also known for realism of place and language, memorable characters, and hatred of hypocrisy and oppression. Born in Florida, Missouri, Clemens moved with his family to Hannibal, Missouri, a port on the Mississippi River, when he was four years old. There he received a public school education. After the death of his father in 1847, Clemens was apprenticed to two Hannibal printers, and in 1851 he began setting type for and contributing sketches to his brother Orion's Hannibal Journal. Subsequently he worked as a printer in Keokuk, Iowa; New York City; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and other cities. Later, Clemens was a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River until the American Civil War brought an end to travel on the river. In 1862 he became a reporter on the Territorial Enterprise in Virginia City, Nevada, and in 1863 he began signing his articles with the pseudonym Mark Twain, a Mississippi River phrase meaning two fathoms deep. In 1867 Twain lectured in New York City, and in the same year he visited Europe and Palestine. He wrote of these travels in The Innocents Abroad, a book exaggerating those aspects of European culture that impress American tourists. Much of Twain's best work was written in the 1870s and 1880s, when he was living in Hartford, Connecticut, or during the summers at Quarry Farm, near Elmira, New York. Roughing It recounts his early adventures as a miner and journalist; The Adventures of Tom Sawyer celebrates boyhood in a town on the Mississippi River; A Tramp Abroad describes a walking trip through the Black Forest of Germany and the Swiss Alps; Life on the Mississippi combines an autobiographical account of his experiences as a river pilot with a visit to the Mississippi nearly two decades after he left it; and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court satirizes oppression in feudal England. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the sequel to Tom Sawyer, is considered Twain's masterpiece. Twain's work during the 1890s and the 1900s is marked by growing pessimism and bitterness. Significant works of this period are Pudd'nhead Wilson, a novel set in the South before the Civil War that criticizes racism by focusing on mistaken racial identities, and Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, a sentimental biography. In Twain's later years he wrote less, but he became a celebrity, frequently speaking out on public issues. He also came to be known for the white linen suit he always wore when making public appearances. Twain received an honorary doctorate from the University of Oxford in 1907. When he died he left an uncompleted autobiography, which was eventually edited by his secretary, Albert Bigelow Paine, and published in 1924. Harriet Smith is one of the editors at the Mark Twain Papers and Project at the Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley. Michael Frank was a Los Angeles Times book critic for nearly ten years, and his short stories and essays have been widely anthologized. His fiction has been presented at Symphony Space's Selected Shorts: A Celebration of the Short Story, and his travel writing has been collected in Italy: The Best Travel Writing from The New York Times. He lives in New York City and Liguria, Italy. Read by Grover Gardner, Simon Vance, Derek Perkins, Julie McKay, James Langton, Marisa Calin, Ralph Lister, Suzanne Elise Freeman, James Patrick Cronin, Andrew Eiden, Scott Brick, Emily Sutton-Smith, Keith Szarabajka, and Justine Eyre

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