Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1: The Complete and Authoritative Edition (Autobiography of Mark

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Would you like to tell us about a lower price? If you are a seller for this product, would you like to suggest updates through seller support? Learn more about Amazon Prime. You will never know how much enjoyment you have lost until you get to dictating your autobiography. The strict instruction that many of these texts remain unpublished for years meant that when they came out, he would be "dead, and unaware, and indifferent," and that he was therefore free to speak his "whole frank mind.

In celebration of this important milestone and in honor of the cherished tradition of publishing Mark Twain's works, UC Press is proud to offer for the first time Mark Twain's uncensored autobiography in its entirety and exactly as he left it. This major literary event brings to readers, admirers, and scholars 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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The ad does not inform my purchase. The video does not play. There is too much buffering. The audio is poor or missing. Video is unrelated to the product. Please fill out the copyright form to register a complaint. Try the Kindle edition and experience these great reading features: Share your thoughts with other customers. The potential reader for this edition should be aware of several items. First, this autobiography is an oversize hardbook which means it may not fit into a bookshelf with other more traditional hardbooks.

Second this is an academic press which means that there is a long introduction and discussion of prior autobiographical starts by Mark Twain for two hundred pages. The actual autobiography of Mark Twain is only pages of transcriptions from his dictation of his attempt to write his life story. Two more volumes will be published later.

Third, this edition is a rambling text with no chronological sequence. Mark Twain told stories as he remembered as they came to his memory. None of these observations are negative but the reader should be aware of these differences. This book aims to be the definitive edition by publishing everything that Mark dictated or wrote after in the order that it came into creation.

Prior publications were much shorter as various editors organized what they thought was interesting, had his family's approval and was in some chronlogical sequence Charles Neider did the best overall job of this fifty years ago. What the reader has here is Mark Twain's true speaking voice -- he is doing a monologue in your presence, going wherever his memory takes him.

It really was like getting to sit and listen to the man talk. He is extremely sharp and funny. His descriptive abilities are unsurpassed. Since he knew this would not be published until a century after his death, he was not censored in his opinions. His comments about Theodore Roosevelt are hilarious. My only quibble with Volume Three is that I wish the Ashcroft-Lyon Papers had been inserted into the autobiography to correspond with the time they were written.

As I was reading, I had wondered why there was such a huge gap in diary entries during the summer of , which is explained in the introduction to the A-L Papers. This is not a book to be read from cover to cover in one or two sittings. I read this book while reading other books over the course of several months.

Autobiography of Mark Twain: The Complete and Authoritative Edition, Vol. 1

I would read two to four entries at a time and absorb what he said. The reason why I say the reader should use two bookmarks is this: This gave me a better feel for the subject and who people were. It really enriched the reading experience. Author, critic and playwright William Dean Howells--and Twain's friend for more than four decades--referred to Twain as "the Lincoln of our literature. He was a journeyman printer, steamboat pilot, newspaper reporter, prospector, world traveler, platform lecturer, inventor, businessman, family man, and at the time of his death he was the most recognizable man on the planet.

For almost forty years, I taught "Huck Finn" to my high school students and read everything about Mark Twain that I could find, including the original edition of his autobiography as well as published collections of his letters and biographies by Justin Kaplan "Mr. Just when you think you have learned everything about Twain, the University of California Press comes out with the definitive version of his autobiography.

This second volume does more of the same. I actually find it very boring in places. There are some interesting tidbits in there though. See all 3 questions about Autobiography of Mark Twain…. Lists with This Book. View all 13 comments. I read this in the audiobook version. I believe that Mark Twain would have had a good laugh at the pomposity of the editors and their footnotes; unfortunately I found it insufferably boring and a very poor use of audio.

If I had been reading a print version I would have skimmed or skipped this beginning all together. A very brief "We got this stuff from lots of different places and times and some of it's literal and some of it isn't. Enjoy," would have been fine with me. Twain does an excellent job of explaining himself. A mishmash of writing by Mark Twain. Some made me smile, some was historically interesting and some made me shake me head in wonder that so little has changed in years. View all 5 comments. I read the whole thing cover to cover minus the appendix notes, which I merely browsed.

And as massive as it was, I was genuinely sad when the last page came. I'm ready for volume two right now. I feel so fortunate to be alive in and get to read these words Twain didn't want published until years after his death. Actually, much of it has been published before so there was a lot I was already familiar with. But it was almost magical to read Twain's thoughts, musings, and mor I read the whole thing cover to cover minus the appendix notes, which I merely browsed.

But it was almost magical to read Twain's thoughts, musings, and more-than-occassional ramblings that have never been made public before.

When else does this happen with favorite artists, musicians, writers who are long dead? Twain is all over the place here -- the topics are random and far flung. But his voice rings true on every page. His lovely, cranky, cynical, hilarious, insightful, entertaining, voice. I simply can't get enough. Clemens became a very important and popular public figure, attended countless lunches, dinners, and meetings and was a highly sought-after speaker.

His reminiscences are full of famous people, and he really seems to enjoy being a name-dropper, since he mixed with the rich and the powerful , but the names don't carry nearly the weight these days as they would have even 50 years ago. History buffs will recognise a lot of them, but other than that, we have to take his word for it that it was a real coup to be received by Mrs So-and-So. My dad would have loved it, and I admit to a bit of a thrill when I saw one of his books as one of the MANY references! I grew up with Twain all around me, since he was my father's speciality , so it was kind of like reading about a famous distant relative.

He's a good storyteller, but mostly it's the absolutely beautiful command of the language that is such a joy. I just had to read some sentences or episodes aloud. Gee, I wish people could still write like that. View all 6 comments. Well let me start off by saying I have always disliked Garrison Keillor and now feel certain that it would be reciprocal if say we met at a party.

Autobiography of Mark Twain Vol. 1 The Complete and Authoritative Edition by M

For those of you not aware of why a review about Mark Twain's autobiography starts with a my dislike of Keillor, feel free to check out Keillor's take on this book in the New York Times. And then do remember that Twain was a great American writer who popularized the travelogue, the American historical novel and was a master of creating sketches of Ame Well let me start off by saying I have always disliked Garrison Keillor and now feel certain that it would be reciprocal if say we met at a party.

And then do remember that Twain was a great American writer who popularized the travelogue, the American historical novel and was a master of creating sketches of American life, while lampooning the stubborn, the crass and sometimes the hateful or desperate in our world. GK on the other hand, has mined middle america for a type of ironic cornpone that affords a chuckle of recognition over his knowledge of cultural mileposts for a tiny group of people that may have existed for years, if they ever existed at all.

He might have begun that crap as satire, but his own limited abilities to create a fine point have made his believers see his homespun b. Oh, that he has a style there is no doubt, but so did Henry Luce and Leni Reifenstahl. And Sarah Palin who probably tunes in regularly. In contrast, the sketches throughout this book and the sense that Twain went at this a few different ways is exactly why this book is worthwhile. The chance to pick up this hefty book it's main drawback if you can call it that and be drawn into a story about a Venetian house Twain has rented that he puzzles over why are the stables right below the bedrooms?

I am not sure I understand his point. Have you read Twain before? Did you not expect details galore? I would say, I'd like less of Suzy, Twain's daughter in this, but that is to be expected from a very proud father. But stories like the story of being spied on without clothes by girls at a young age and then remaining terrified all of his childhood that they would tease him in front of their group is simple truth.

And then when he runs into one of the girls as old people--that's the type of tale that I WOULD stand in the middle of the room at a party to enjoy. As you can imagine, I have not finished the book and do not expect to. Sort of like a child's pool in the backyard in hot August, the idea is to dip in as needed. It also seems like a nice neighborly book to keep around the other books, allowing them to look with awe at its massive bulk and feel comforted that they were all in a house that appreciated diversity and had no truck with coordinated displays on shelves.

And of course, if a certain radio hack in love with his own voice happens by one fine day I can always use it for a quick chuck. It will survive the anger. And flourish in spite of it, of that I have no doubt. View all 4 comments. I'm saddened to say, I'm glad it's over. This loosely organized collection of rough drafts, unfinished sketches, false starts, essays about other people and dictated notes about random events met with a terrible fate at the hands of the editors, who obviously thought that we'd be just as thrilled to read their take on this autobiography.

More than pages of tedious ramblings about what a great job they did is not my idea of quality editing. Yeah, I realize it's an academic edition I'm saddened to say, I'm glad it's over.

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Yeah, I realize it's an academic edition, so it's supposed to be like that, including the long introduction and the detailed description of prior autobiographical attempts, but chasing down each scrap of autobiographical notes AND informing us in detail about the whole process is a bit too much.

I wonder whether I, as a reader, would prefer to have a more austerely edited variant of the book meaning that trivial and uninteresting parts would be left out , so that I'm granted the ability to preserve my opinion of Twain's writing, or whether I'd feel that I'm missing out on something important I'm afraid I'm not, though. I won't be reading the next volumes - I think it's preferable for me to just stick to his other works. Sep 17, Megan Baxter rated it really liked it. To tell the truth, I'm not really sure what version of this I read.

It was on the kindle I still have on long-term loan from a friend thanks again, Amy! I read some of Mark Twain's autobiography. The rest of this review has been withdrawn due to the changes in Goodreads policy and enforcement. You can read why I came to this decision here. In the meantime, you can read the entire review at Smorgasbook. It is a sorry day when I have to write a review of anything by Mark Twain and say I didn't like it, given that I adore Twain and pretty much all of his previously published works.

So why didn't I like this book? And why will I boycott Volumes 2 and 3 when presumably they're published? The only difference he It is a sorry day when I have to write a review of anything by Mark Twain and say I didn't like it, given that I adore Twain and pretty much all of his previously published works. The only difference here is that Twain's folks waited until he'd been dead years, purported in accordance with Twain's own instructions.

So then, if the only issue is the century of delay, why is the quality poor? It's poor because Twain never actually wrote a "book" called his autobiography. Repeatedly throughout his life he'd start an autobiography, dictate a few chapters, and then drop it. Twain never completed any book that he would have said was his autobiography, much less edited or polished any of the snippets he'd dictated.

Would that it WERE an autobiography. But since it's not, if you're really interested in Twain's life, read a biography of him written by a real author. View all 8 comments. Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally. It's funny, I think, how random the process can sometimes be of who we as a culture decide to remember for decades or sometimes centuries after their time, and who we tend to forget just a generation or two after their death, no matter how famous they were when alive; take for example Samuel Clemens, who I Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.

It's funny, I think, how random the process can sometimes be of who we as a culture decide to remember for decades or sometimes centuries after their time, and who we tend to forget just a generation or two after their death, no matter how famous they were when alive; take for example Samuel Clemens, who I'll be referring to for the rest of this essay by his pen-name Mark Twain, no more notorious in the late s than a hundred other people who served as his peers, but now a century later with 90 percent of those peers forgotten by the general public, but with Twain still thought of in an almost godlike fashion, pretty remarkable for a failed journalist and a bit of a crank who is best known for a series of folksy populist tales about a romanticized American past.

But then again, once you stop and think about it, Twain actually accomplished a lot more than these businessmen and politicians around him who have now faded into obscurity; because for international readers who might not know, Twain came of age in a period of American history very similar in my opinion to what a place like India is going through right now -- a period when the US was dragging itself from second-world to first-world status for the first time, and was desperate to establish its first generation of artists, writers and thinkers to have a truly global effect on culture, artists who espoused an entirely new school of thought apart from what they learned simply by traveling to the already established parts of the cultured world.

And Twain was one of these people, who at first became an international hit by writing post-Civil-War "pastoral" tales about a quaint and innocent rural America that had never actually existed, then honed his skills in his later years into a series of brilliantly satirical tales challenging the status quo, establishing a type of unique "American humor" snarky, political, pop-culture-infused that many Americans fondly look at as an integral part of our entire national spirit.

So no wonder, then, that Twain's century-in-waiting autobiography has unexpectedly become such a huge hit see this fascinating NYT article for more -- turns out that the academic press who put this out went with an original print run of only 7, copies, thinking that the page tome would be of interest to scholars only, but with it in actuality selling a third of a million copies in just its first few months ; not just because of Twain's still near-holy status with most Americans, but because of the instantly intriguing hook behind its publication, the fact that Twain demanded that it not be published until a full hundred years after his death, so that he could feel free to write whatever nasty little stuff about the people around him that he wanted.

Now, granted, this hasn't quite held true in the resulting century -- four smaller versions of this behemoth manuscript were published at various points throughout the 20th century -- but here on the literal centennial of his death, we are finally seeing the full and uncensored version for the first time, a publicist's wet dream that has made for dozens of fevered headlines from a lazy mainstream press.

But there are several important things to know about this book before reading it technically only volume one of a coming three-book set , things that will help temper your enthusiasm down to a reasonable level; for example, of that giant bound volume now in stores, a full half of it is merely obsessive notes concerning the condition of the "Mark Twain Papers" when they were unearthed again for this project, with there turning out to have been three different physical copies in the vaults with multiple sets of notes, their authors and ages often in doubt, which was then further complicated by the fact that Twain sometimes out-and-out lied in these reminisces, sometimes exaggerated the truth, and sometimes in his old age simply got details wrong when transcribing them.

And that's the second important thing to know -- that far from this being a traditional bio written in a linear or thematic order, Twain constructed these notes in the years before his death by dictating them to a stenographer from his bed in the mornings, three hours a day, nearly every day for four years straight, which he found such a delightful arrangement that he decided not to give his thoughts any kind of order at all, but rather ramble on about whatever struck his fancy that particular moment, no matter how little it might correspond to what he was talking about the day before.

And pardon the trendiness of saying something like this, but that really does make this book less of a "biography" and more like the world's first blog, one that had maybe a dozen real-time readers back when he was first writing it, and especially when you add the literal clipped newspaper articles that Twain included in these transcripts, to further illustrate whatever little topic he was talking about that day.

In fact, Twain addresses this very issue in a highly meta way, spending several days discussing the tiny little scandal that was rocking the nation that week [some middle-class mom accidentally getting snubbed at some White House event], then musing on whether anyone was going to remember this incident even a decade from then, much less the "high future" of the early s he was envisioning when writing it. And that's really the third important thing to understand about this book -- that despite the salacious reports from a contemporary media industry desperate to prove its own relevance, there's not really anything in Twain's autobiography that's going to come as a big shock, with his hundred-year delay done mostly to protect the feelings of little nobodies who Twain was angry at in his grumpy old age, such as the chapter on the horrible Italian woman who once rented his family a run-down house one summer.

I mean, yes, Twain definitely unloads at various points on famous peers like, say, Jay Gould banking magnate and the ninth richest man on the planet at his death ; but Gould was one of the most hated men in the country by that point, the exact kind of tycoon that Twain skewered in his vicious The Gilded Age , so it comes as no surprise that he would dump on him in his "secret" memoirs as well.

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Now add a scholarly page introduction to the entire thing, plus a copy of all the failed attempts Twain made at this autobiography in the years before this dictation process, and you quickly realize that the meat of this volume really only lays in a page section right in the middle of it, a much more manageable challenge than what this doorstop of a book suggests. But still, there's plenty of interesting things to read about in that page core, including lots of stories about his childhood in rural Missouri and how they relate to his fictional books about that period; lots of invective against the various schemers, dreamers and other inventors who essentially bankrupted Twain several times over the course of his life; plenty of anecdotes about contemporaries like U.

Grant, Booker Washington and Grover Cleveland; plenty of stories about family life, the ins and outs of marriage and fatherhood, and the various places they all lived over the decades; and on and on like this, most delivered in the same trademark style that make his public books so loved as well, a combination of optimism and fatalism that Twain was a master of spinning and twisting so much that you find yourself eventually laughing out loud from its sheer pathos.

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