By Guy Adams
Exactly a century after rumours of his death turned out to be entirely accurate, one of Mark Twain's dying wishes is at last coming true: an extensive, outspoken and revelatory autobiography which he devoted the last decade of his life to writing is finally going to be published.They make much of salacious details in the article, but, having been tantalized most of my life by biographies of Twain/Clemens, I want to see what he really thought.
The creator of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn and some of the most frequently misquoted catchphrases in the English language left behind 5,000 unedited pages of memoirs when he died in 1910, together with handwritten notes saying that he did not want them to hit bookshops for at least a century.
That milestone has now been reached, and in November the University of California, Berkeley, where the manuscript is in a vault, will release the first volume of Mark Twain's autobiography. The eventual trilogy will run to half a million words, and shed new light on the quintessentially American novelist.
H/T Lowkey at FDR.
2 comments:
Put me on that list, I've enjoyed his rye sense of humor since I was a young boy, having it read to me.
Whoops, I lost my formatting. You can tell where they left off and I started in what looks like the last paragraph. My sentence starts with "They..."
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