"This book would have delighted Mark Twain. He never shrank from the limelight, and here is a sumptuous 300-page quarto devoted to picture and letter-press covering almost every highlight of his long and varied career."— New York Times

"There can be no doubt that this is a book no lover of Mark Twain will wish to be without."— Chicago Tribune

"[Readers] will find here much they have not seen before. . . . Mr. Meltzer's ingenuity in finding materials is particularly striking in his illustrations for the difficult early period, before the camera was in general use and before anyone considered the image of Sam Clemens worth preserving for posterity. . . . Meltzer has done his work well."— New York Herald Tribune

"This book is for leisure hours and quiet meditation. It brings back the life and times of Mark Twain, our greatest humorist, and it holds up as a mirror the early days of our country. It should inspire and help us preserve our priceless heritage of freedom."— Hartford Courant

"Mark Twain Himself ranks as one of the most entertaining works ever produced about one of America's most influential writers. . . . Milton Meltzer has assembled an impressive number of previously unpublished photographs of Mark Twain, his family, the people he knew or wrote about , and the places he saw."— San Francisco Sunday Chronicle

About the Author

Milton Meltzer has written a great many books for both children and adults, including Dorothea Lange: A Photographer's Life and Carl Sandburg: A Biography. He now resides in New York City.

《馬克‧吐溫 自傳》 Autobiography of Mark Twain，杭州：浙江文藝 2011

1924 Autobiography . Employing a self-described "methodless method," Twain had begun dictating his memoir to Albert Bigelow Paine in 1906 from a set of notes, recording whatever came to his mind at the moment. The result is an  unsystematic , though entertaining and often instructive, collection of anecdotes, with the degree of invention the source of subsequent critical debate.

Read more:  http://www.answers.com/topic/mark-twain#ixzz1Uc6r8zaE

Autobiography of Mark Twain or  Mark Twain's Autobiography refers to a lengthy set of reminiscences, dictated, for the most part, in the last few years of  American author  Mark Twain's life and left in typescript and manuscript at his death. The  Autobiography comprises a rambling collection of anecdotes and ruminations rather than a conventional  autobiography .

Contents 1  Volume 1 1.1  Twain-scripted Contents 2  Previous publication 3  Twain's own attempt 4  Early editions 5  References 6  External links

Volume 1

The first volume of a three-volume edition of the complete text was published in November 2010, the 100th anniversary year of Twain's death, edited by the The Mark Twain Project of The Bancroft Library at  University of California, Berkeley and published by  University of California Press . ^{[1] [2] [3]}

Twain-scripted Contents

• The Tennessee Land (1870) ^[4]
• Chapter 1 --Early Years in Florida. Missouri (1877) ^[5]
• Grant Dictations (1885)  ^[6]
• Vienna Sketches (1898) ^[7]
• Scraps from my Autobiography (1900)
  • Chapter IX ^[8]
  • Jeanne d'ARC ^[9]
    • Notes ^[10]
• Introductions for previous attempts at autobiography ^[11]
• Preface. As from the grave (for Florence attempt) ^[12]
• Florence Dictations (1904) ^[13]
• New York Dictations (1906; January--March) ^[14]

Vol.1 also contains an introduction ^[15] and copious  Explanatory Notes ^[16]

Previous publication

1924 edition

Twain himself had published 'Chapters from My Autobiography' in twenty-five installments in the  North American Review in 1906-7. ^[17] Since Twain's death in 1910, a number of different editors have made ​​​​attempts to impose some order on the whole of the material by selection and reorganization, producing several decidedly different published versions of  The Autobiography . The first of these was published in 1924 by  Harper & Brothers Publishers.

Twain's own attempt

Twain first started to compose an autobiography in 1870, but proceeded fitfully, abandoning the work and returning to it as the mood took him. In a 1904 letter to William Dean Howells, he wrote: “I've struck it! And I will give it away—to you. You will never know how much enjoyment you have lost until you get to dictating your autobiography.”  ^[18] By 1904 Twain had embarked on what he called his “Final (and Right) Plan” for telling the story of his life. However, after 1907 he again seems to have let the book languish; in 1908-9 he hardly added to it at all, and he declared the project concluded in 1909, after the death of his youngest daughter Jean. His innovative notion — to “talk only about the thing which interests you for the moment” — meant that his thoughts could range freely. Twain thought his autobiography would be most entertaining if he went off on whims and tangents in non-sequential order.

Twain outlined a plan in 1899 for an autobiographical work which was to be published (according to different accounts of the episode) either "100 years from now" or "100 years after his death." A manuscript note in the Mark Twain Papers (UC Berkeley) indicates a 100-year ban was what he was contemplating. Twain did produce a preface 'From the Grave' claiming that the book would not be published until after his death, which allowed him to speak with his "whole frank mind."

The manuscript and typescript materials of the Autobiography are in the Mark Twain Papers at The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

Early editions

The first edition of the  Autobiography was published by Twain's personal friend and literary executor  Albert Bigelow Paine , and consisted of twenty-two fragments presented in the order Twain composed them, including the first four months (January-April 1906) of the Autobiographical Dictations. The edition received rather poor reviews. In 1940, editor and historian  Bernard DeVoto published another selection in  Mark Twain in Eruption , arranged by topic and heavily edited. Charles Neider rejected both Paine's and DeVoto's approaches and rearranged the material to match the chronology of a standard autobiography. In spite of these previous efforts, around half of the Mark Twain Project text will be seeing publication for the first time.

References

1. ^ Churchwell, Sarah (2010-11-01)  "Mark Twain: Not an American but  the American" ,  The Guardian . Retrieved 2010-11-01.
2. ^  "Mark Twain's Autobiography, Finally Released" .  CBS News . May 24, 2010 . Retrieved August 13, 2010 .
3. ^ Mark Twain Project Online (2010-11-01)  "Mark Twain Papers & Project: A Brief History"
4. ^ Vol.I, p.85
5. ^ Vol.I, p.89
6. ^ Vol.I, p.94
7. ^ Vol.I, p.158
8. ^ Vol.I, p.213
9. ^ Vol.I, p.227
10. ^ Vol.I, p.245
11. ^ Vol. I, p.280
12. ^ Vol. I, p.310
13. ^ Vol. I, p.312
14. ^ Vol. I, p.352
15. ^ Vol.I, p.22
16. ^ Vol. I, p.649
17. ^ "Mark Twain's own autobiography: the chapters from the North American review" ,  Google Books . Retrieved 2010-05-27.
18. ^  Cox, James M. (November 2002).  Mark Twain:The Fate of Humor (Mark Twain & His Circle) . University of Missouri Press. pp. 295.  ISBN  978-0826214287 .

External links

• "The Autobiography of Mark Twain Summary & Study Guide" on  eNotes .com.
• "Autobiography of Mark Twain Volume 1: Introduction"
• This is Mark Twain , combines video slideshows, images, interviews with the editors and other Mark Twain scholars, and audio clips of excerpts, to jump between the pages of the  Autobiography of Mark Twain .

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