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“With the uncensored Twain finally here, we’re the furthest thing from indifferent.” —Time Magazine

“Dip into the first enormous volume of Twain’s autobiography that he had decreed should not appear until one hundred 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.” —New York Times

“Mark Twain is his own greatest character in this brilliant self-portrait…It is published complete and unexpurgated for the first time. Eschewing chronology and organization, Twain simply meanders from observation to anecdote and between past and present. There are gorgeous reminiscences from his youth of landscapes, rural idylls, and Tom Sawyeresque japes; acid-etched profiles of friends and enemies, from his ‘fiendish’ Florentine landlady to the fatuous and ‘grotesque’ Rockefellers; a searing polemic on a 1906 American massacre of Filipino insurgents; a hilarious screed against a hapless editor who dared tweak his prose; and countless tales of the author’s own bamboozlement, unto bankruptcy, by publishers, business partners, doctors, miscellaneous moochers; he was even outsmarted by a wild turkey. 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. His is a world where every piety conceals fraud and every arcadia a trace of violence; he relishes the human comedy and reveres true nobility, yet as he tolls the bell for friends and family…he feels that life is a pointless charade. Twain’s memoirs are a pointillist masterpiece from which his vision of America—half paradise, half swindle—emerges with indelible force.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Twain’s writing here is electric, alternately moving and hilarious. He couldn’t write a ho-hum sentence.” —Library Journal

“Mark Twain, always so blithely ahead of his time, has just outdone himself: he’s 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 Clemens’ 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 Twain’s life—that is the prosaic work of biographers—but 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 typesetter—except that it works.” —Ron Powers, author of Mark Twain: A Life

“Mark Twain dictated much of this book—now it is a book at last—from 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 Pope’s head. It is true but it doesn’t give even a whiff of the grandeur of the thing.” —Robert D. Richardson, author of Emerson: The Mind on Fire

“In explaining his dissatisfaction with his early attempts to write his life story, Mark Twain blamed the narrowness of the conventional cradle-to-grave format…This volume—the first of three—makes public autobiographical dictations in which Twain unpredictably pursues the many side-excursions of his remarkably creative life…On some side-excursions, Twain flashes the irreverent wit that made him famous…But perhaps the most important side-excursions are those retracing the imaginative prospecting of a miner for literary gold, efforts that resulted in such works as Roughing It and Innocents Abroad. A treasure trove for serious Twain readers.” —Booklist (starred review)

“Promises a no-holds-barred perspective on Twain’s life and will be rich with rambunctious, uncompromising opinions.” —Herald (Glasgow)

The Complete and Authoritative Edition

Edited by Harriet Elinor Smith and other editors of the Mark Twain Project

A New York Times and USA Today bestseller!

“I’ve struck it!” Mark Twain wrote in a 1904 letter to a friend. “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.”

Thus, after dozens of false starts and hundreds of pages, Twain embarked on his “Final (and Right) Plan” for telling the story of his life. His innovative notion—to “talk only about the thing which interests you for the moment”—meant that his thoughts could range freely. The strict instruction that many of these texts remain unpublished for one hundred 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.”

The year 2010 marks the one hundredth anniversary of Twain’s death. In celebration of this important milestone, here, for the first time, is Mark Twain’s uncensored autobiography, in its entirety, exactly as he left it. This major literary event offers 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.

About the Author: Mark Twain (1835–1910) was born Samuel L. Clemens in the town of Florida, Missouri. One of the most popular and influential authors our nation has ever produced, his keen wit and incisive satire earned him praise from both critics and peers. He has been called not only the greatest humorist of his age but the father of American literature.