Mark Twain Papers #11: Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 2: The Complete and Authoritative Edition

“It feels like a form of time travel. One moment youre on horseback in the Hawaiian islands — or recovering from saddle boils with a cigar in your mouth — and the next moment youre meeting the Viennese maid he called, in a private joke, ‘Wuthering Heights. We can hardly wait for Volume 2.”— New York Times

“Twain's autobiography, finally available after a century, is a garrulous outpouring—and every word beguiles.”— Wall Street Journal

“I start reading Twains Autobiography at any page and dont want to stop, for the sheer voluptuous pleasure of the prose.”— Roger Ebert

“Mark Twain is his own greatest character in this brilliant self-portrait. . . . Laced with Twain's unique blend of humor and vitriol, the haphazard narrative is engrossing, hugely funny, and deeply revealing of its author's mind. . . . Twain's memoirs are a pointillist masterpiece from which his vision of America--half paradise, half swindle--emerges with indelible force.”— Publishers Weekly

“Dip into the first enormous volume of Twains autobiography that he had decreed should not appear until 100 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.”—Edward Rothstein, New York Times

“When Twain dictated his memoirs, he said he wanted to speak his whole, frank mind. But he didn't want the full text published until he'd been dead 100 years, ‘unaware and indifferent. With the uncensored Twain finally here, we're the furthest thing from indifferent.”— Time Magazine

“Sometimes the autobiography seems Twains letter to posterity. At other times, reading it feels like eavesdropping on a conversation he is having with himself. . . . This first installment of Twains autobiography brings us closer to all of him than we have ever come before.”— New York Review of Books

“. . . The merit of the autobiography is its revelation of every facet of Samuel Clemens – how modern a figure he is, and how topical his concerns. Take the polemical verve of Christopher Hitchens. Toss in the fun-poking news instincts of the American broadcaster Jon Stewart. Add the traveller's curiosity and gentle wit of a Bill Bryson, plus the raw energy of Ernest Hemingway, and then stir in an entire Oxford dictionary of aphorisms, and you start to get an approximation of a man who spanned virtually every literary genre – and in the process became one of the most quoted (and misquoted) writers to walk the earth.”— The Independent

“The Autobiography, as it begins here, is richly humorous, self-deprecating (if not always in earnest), full of anecdotes about great and small. . . . The meandering, the discursiveness, the parentheses promising the later resumption of a story (‘And some time I wish to talk about that), the mockery (desolate at bottom) of pretension, all these distinguish this first volume. We will have to mark time until there is more, but the wait is bound to be worthwhile. It's been a century coming, after all.”— The Australian

The eagerly-awaited Volume 2 delves deeper into Mark Twains life, uncovering the many roles he played in his private and public worlds. Filled with his characteristic blend of humor and ire, the narrative ranges effortlessly across the contemporary scene. He shares his views on writing and speaking, his preoccupation with money, and his contempt for the politics and politicians of his day. Affectionate and scathing by turns, his intractable curiosity and candor are everywhere on view.

Editors:

Harriet E. Smith, Benjamin Griffin, Victor Fischer, Michael B. Frank, Sharon K. Goetz, Leslie Diane Myrick