Mark Twain's Autobiography

From : Slate
Photo : www.slate.com

Samuel Clemens' Secret

What Mark Twain's Autobiography doesn't reveal.

Quick hype check: Mark Twain said he'd be so "frank and free and unembarrassed" in writing his memoirs that he'd be forced to suppress them until he'd been dead for 100 years. That anniversary arrived last year, but don't expect much in the first volume of the first unexpurgated edition of his autobiography to be shocking or new. On the contrary, The Autobiography of Mark Twain—95 percent of which has been published elsewhere, most of it in three previous editions of the work—is tame, unfrank, and highly embarrassed. Twain is not about to join Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Benjamin Franklin on the "Rhetoric of the Self" syllabus. Or maybe he would, if the amorphous mass of anecdotes and memories ushered into this doorstopper of a book were shaped into something smaller and more pungent. The claim to uniqueness made by the editors of this edition, however, is that they have included absolutely everything, either in the body of the Autobiography or else in a section called "Preliminary Manuscripts," in the order in which they think Twain meant for it to appear.

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