Outside the Beltway

Mark Twain Autobiography To Be Released This Year

Alex Knapp · Sunday, May 23, 2010 · 1 comment

Here’s something I never knew. Mark Twain wrote an autobiography. And left instructions that it wasn’t to be published for 100 years.

And this year marks 100 years.

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.

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.

This should definitely make for some interesting reading. I’ve been a fan of Twain for awhile now–though actually mostly his nonfiction, rather than his fiction. So reading this is something I’m looking forward to.