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1924
- Twain's autobiography was originally published in 1924 (fourteen years after Twain's death) by Albert Bigelow Paine in New York. It was published in two volumes as Mark Twain's Autobiography.
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McMasters' The Mark Twain Encyclopedia states that Twain did not wear a white suit in his last three years, except at one banquet speech. [168] In his autobiography, Twain writes of his early experiments with wearing white out-of-season: [169]
- Introduction
- Author Biography
- Plot Summary
- Key Figures
- Themes
- Style
- Historical Context
- Critical Overview
- Criticism
- Sources
The Autobiography of Mark Twainis as famous for its fictional qualities as for its lively writing style. This is one of the reasons the work—which exists in three distinct and competing versions—has lived on for generations and inspired much debate. This entry studies the 1959 version, edited and arranged by Charles Neider and available in paperbac...
Mark Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemenson November 30, 1835, in the village of Florida, Missouri. When his father died in 1847, Clemens—who was only twelve years old at the time—was sent to be a printer's apprentice. While his early life was spent in Missouri, Clemens left home as a young man and was a traveler for the rest of his life, often ...
Preface
The author explains to his readers that since the publication of his autobiography will happen after he is dead, he is "speaking from the grave," and so will not have to censor himself.
Chapters 1-17
Clemens is born in the small village of Florida, Missouri. He remembers an uncle whom he admired, and describes this uncle's general store and the farm where Clemens stayed for a few months each year. Clemens says that he could never be totally equal with his Negro friends on the farm, due to their differences in skin color and social stature. He recalls his mother and father, and explores his ancestral connection to Geoffrey Clement, who helped to sentence England's King Charles I to death....
Chapters 18-28
Clemens's father dies in 1847, sending the family into poverty. Clemens becomes a printer's apprentice, then works for his brother Orion's newspaper. Orion is so honest that he lowers prices too far to make a profit, a trend he continues with other businesses. Clemens decides to travel to South America, then becomes a riverboat pilot instead. In a dream, he predicts his brother Henry's upcoming death. He then joins the Confederate army for two weeks while in Louisiana. Through a personal conn...
Elisha Bliss
Elisha Bliss, who works for the American Publishing Company, offers Twain the contract for The Innocents Abroad, then delays publication of the book, for fear its humorous quality would offend readers, until Twain threatens a lawsuit. Ironically, the book is a success. Twain publishes several more books with Bliss, and it is only after Bliss's death that Twain finds out from the publishing company how badly Bliss had swindled him in skimming money from the company.
Clara Clemens
Clara Clemens is Twain's second-born daughter. In her twenties, Clara is known as being extremely honest, and her mother Olivia believes that she cannot tell a lie. Clara is thus recruited to take care of her mother when her mother falls ill, so that she can lie to her mother about the severity of her illness. Olivia is a very watchful person, and while she is in her sickbed, she analyzes every report that Clara gives her about the outside world. The lying is painful for Clara, who often has...
Henry Clemens
Henry Clemens is Twain's younger brother. He often tells his parents about Twain's many mischievous acts when he and Twain are children, and Twain makes Henry the object of many pranks. Because Henry rarely does anything naughty, Twain usually gets blamed when Henry actually does something bad. Henry is injured in a steam boiler explosion while working as a mud clerk (a volunteer position) on Twain's riverboat. Although Henry survives the accident and begins to heal, he dies when some inexper...
Truth and Lies
The Autobiography of Mark Twain begins with a preface from Twain that states the "frankest and freest and privatest product of the human mind is a love letter," and that with his autobiography, he intends to be this frank and honest with his readers. The book is saturated with references to truth. However, when one compares Twain's autobiographical accounts with real-life events, they do not always match, a fact noted by many reviewers. Indeed, Twain himself admits at the beginning of the wor...
Vanity
Vanity is another key theme in the book. To extend the Webster example, after he swindles Twain out of his company, Webster takes a number of management actions based on his vanity that eventually sink the company. These actions include insisting on expensive offices that are larger than necessary and publishing all books that are offered directly to him, not Twain. After the huge success of the Grant book that Twain secured, Webster takes the credit for its success. "In his obscure days his...
Mortality
The fragile quality of human life plays an important role in Twain's autobiography. True to the times he lives in, people are susceptible to many fatal and crippling illnesses, including many of Twain's family and friends.
Organization
Although Charles Neider's version of the The Autobiography of Mark Twainis organized chronologically, the material within each chapter still reflects Twain's original intent to impose no structure on the material other than that which was created by his freeform dictations. This lack of formal organization forces the reader to pay greater attention to details, since the details are not neatly packaged. The lack of formal organization also creates links between subjects that might not be there...
Humor
Twain was known as a humorist and demonstrated a playful quality in most of his writings. This is evident throughout the book, in which he uses humorous phrases to describe situations, such as when wasps are crawling up the leg of a boy so stricken with shyness by some girls in the room that he cannot move. Twain describes the wasps as "prospecting around," and says that "one group of excursionists after another climbed up Jim's legs and resented even the slightest wince or squirm that he ind...
One of the reasons The Autobiography of Mark Twain continues to engage readers is its detailed, first-person account of the historical events of the time. Twain lived during formative years in the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when America was experiencing growing painsand defining its national identity. It is no surprise that Twain ...
To understand the critical reception of The Autobiography of Mark Twain, one must examine the context in which all of the versions were created and released, the intentions of each editor, and the debate over the works that continues today. Twain's autobiography, in the form that he intended it to be released, exists in the form of a massive, 400,0...
Ryan D. Poquette
Poquette has a bachelor's degree in English and specializes in writing about literature. In the following essay, Poquette proposes a model for divining the truth in Twain's autobiography. How does one go about reading The Autobiography of Mark Twain? Noted by generations of critics and readers alike for its sprawling collection of experiences that lack an obvious structure, the work has also been studied with a historical microscope to determine what facts hold up under inspection. Indeed, ev...
What Do I Read Next?
1. Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage(1895) is a classic Civil War novel that claims to gives a first-hand, realistic account of the war experience, which is often traumatic and without glory. 2. The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Writings (1869) is a collection of some of Bret Harte's best-known works. Harte was at the forefront of American literaturein his day, and paved the way for many great authors, including Mark Twain. 3. Rudyard Kipling's Kim(1901) is the story of an orphaned Ir...
Michael J. Kiskis
In the following essay, Kiskis examines Twain's reliance on "collaborating"—trying his work out on family and friends—in his creative process, especially in the creation of his autobiography. Our understanding of Mark Twain's creative process continues to be obscured by the complex myth that he, his heirs (literary and legal), and his critics have suggested and reinforced. It is a myth that has been fostered by Twain's own descriptions of his work habits, descriptions that have been too quick...
Gay, Robert M., "The Two Mark Twains," in the Atlantic Monthly,Vol. 166, December 1940, pp. 724-26. Kaplan, Justin, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography,Simon & Schuster, 1983, pp. 233-34, 272, 292, 378. Kiskis, Michael, "Mark Twain and the Collaborative Autobiography," in Studies in the Literary Imagination,Vol. 29, Fall 1996, pp. 27-40. Krauth...
The Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant are an autobiography, in two volumes, of Ulysses S. Grant, the 18th President of the United States. The work focuses on his military career during the Mexican–American War and the American Civil War. The volumes were written during the last year of Grant's life, amid increasing pain from terminal throat ...
- Ulysses S. Grant
- 1885
Nov 15, 2010 · After 100 years, the long-awaited Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1 has emerged. The author dictated his life story to a stenographer, whose notes and papers have been collected into...
- John Mcchesney
Jan 10, 2011 · Mark Twain, 1906 Mark Twain demanded that his autobiography not be published in its entirety until 100 years after his death because he feared that much of it was too incendiary. Now, exactly a century later, the first authoritative volume has arrived, after decades of painstaking scholarship involving tens of thousands of documents -- and ...
May 1, 2020 · Several years earlier he had suggested that Grant write his memoirs, but Grant had demurred, convinced he was no writer. Twain wasn’t the only one who wanted Grant to write his...
Jun 29, 2011 · Small selections of his amazing autobiography were published in 1924, 1940, and 1959, but Twain’s original editor, Albert Bigelow Paine, cut large sections that he found potentially damaging to the author or offensive to early 20th-century readers.
