Mark Twain - Autobiography of Mark Twain: Volume 1, Readers Edition

PRAISE FOR AUTOBIOGRAPHY
OF MARK TWAIN, VOLUME 1

Twains autobiography, finally available after a century, is a garrulous outpouringand every word beguiles.Wall Street Journal

When Twain dictated his memoirs, he said he wanted to speak his whole, frank mind. But he didnt want the full text published until hed been dead 100 years, unaware and indifferent. With the uncensored Twain finally here, were the furthest thing from indifferent.Time

Mark Twain is his own greatest character in this brilliant self-portrait.... Laced with Twains unique blend of humor and vitriol, the haphazard narrative is engrossing, hugely funny, and deeply revealing of its authors mind.... Twains memoirs are a pointillist masterpiece from which his vision of Americahalf paradise, half swindleemerges with indelible force.
Publishers Weekly, STARRED REVIEW

Theres really nothing sulfurous about this book. Mark Twain is terrific company, plain and simple. He knew everyone, went everywhere, seemed to be interested in everything and is capable of making the readerin 2010laugh on nearly every page. And this is not, strictly speaking, an autobiography. Its an autobiographical miscellany, a collection of Twains many attempts to write about his extraordinary life.... This is a book for dipping, not plunging. Read, as Twain might put it, until interest pales, and then jump. It feels like a form of time travel. One moment youre on horseback in the Hawaiian islandsor recovering from saddle boils with a cigar in your mouthand 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/The Opinion Pages (online)

His whole frank mind, sharp and funny, is seared onto every page. [We give it an] A.Entertainment Weekly

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

A major achievement.Choice

The merit of the autobiography is its revelation of every facet of Samuel Clemenshow 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 travellers 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 genreand in the process became one of the most quoted (and misquoted) writers to walk the earth.The Independent (London)

This first volume (of three) is impossible not to admire, so fluent and entertaining a picture does it provide of Twains life.... The text becomes a picaresque adventure story, full of brilliant characters and scarcely believable anecdotes, balancing the mordant wit so prominent in Twains fiction with affectionate portraits of those close to him.Prospect (London)

In its freewheeling, associative blend of character studies, press cuttings, family history, letters and public speeches, it evokes Twains personality with a near-hallucinatory clarity.... Twain employs a light touch, never pausing too long on the same scene, never letting accuracy stand in the way of a good story, putting off academic rigour for the 300 pages of endnotes he probably knew someone would furnish. Flights of fancy inspire anecdotes and vice versa in inexhaustible succession.The National (Abu Dhabi)

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

Pure Twain at his typically discursive, rambling, and droll.... The bard of Hannibal still has much to say.American Heritage

From the Twain scholars at the University of Californias Mark Twain Project, comes the dazzling first volume of the ultimate, authoritative three-volume Autobiography of Mark Twain.... Twains writing here is electric, alternately moving and hilarious. He couldnt write a ho-hum sentence.... To read this volume is to be introduced to Twain as if, thrillingly, for the first time.
Library Journal, STARRED REVIEW

A treasure trove for serious Twain readers.Booklist, STARRED REVIEW

Twain would approve!Bookideas.com

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. Its been a century coming, after all.The Australian (Sydney)

Brimming with Twains humor, ideas and opinions, this is a book for anyone interested in the writers work and life.Curledup.com

This is a book to treasure for all friends of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.Acadiana Life-Style

Twains Autobiography is... experimental, but not free-form. To borrow his metaphor, his narrative stream is less like a canal than a tributaryand its well worth panning for the gold. Above all else, the work uniquely captures the processes of individual memory.The Brooklyn Rail

A life story of such surpassing interest was never told before.
North American Review, September 1906

Mark Twain dictated much of this booknow it is a book at lastfrom a big rumpled bed. Reading it is a bit like climbing in there with him.
Roy Blount, Jr.

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 Popes head. It is true but it doesnt give even a whiff of the grandeur of the thing.Robert D. Richardson, author of Emerson: The Mind on Fire

Mark Twain, always so blithely ahead of his time, has just outdone himself: hes 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 Clemenss 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 Twains lifethat is the prosaic work of biographersbut 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 typesetterexcept that it works.
Ron Powers, author of Mark Twain: A Life

AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MARK TWAIN

VOLUME 1 | READERS EDITION

The Mark Twain Project is an editorial and
publishing program of The Bancroft Library,
working since 1967 to create a comprehensive
critical edition of everything Mark Twain wrote.