Mark Twain's Autobiography

Mark Twain tells all in “new” autobiography

A recent PBS NewsHour segment on the preparations at the University of California Press for the publication this November of Volume One of the uncensored autobiography of Mark Twain—not to be published until 100 years after his death—takes us behind the “unmarked door in the Bancroft Library” at Berkeley and into the Mark Twain Archive. The Twain scholars at work offer some teasing glimpses of what’s to come.

SPENCER MICHELS: Editor Ben Griffin, who joined the Twain Project five years ago, relates another jolting passage, where Twain took out his anger on an entrepreneur named James Paige, who lost him money.

BENJAMIN GRIFFIN, editor, Autobiography of Mark Twain: This is the end of the piece he wrote about Paige.

 "Paige and I always meet on effusively affectionate terms, and yet he knows perfectly well that, if I had his nuts in a steel trap, I would shut out all human succor and watch that trap until he died."

GO HERE for PBS NewsHour segment on the uncensored autobiography.

Twain did not allow this story of his life to be made public for 100 years.  Today "tell all" memoirs appear before the ink is dry on court rulings and YouTube films reveal indiscretions as they are in progress.  Any thoughts on when and why this all changed so radically?