Mark Twain To Reveal All After 100 Year Wait

Hugh Pickens writes "The Independent reports that one of Mark Twain's dying wishes is at last coming true: an extensive, outspoken and revelatory autobiography which he devoted the last decade of his life to writing is finally going to be published one hundred years after his death. Twain, the pen name of Samuel Clemens, left behind 5,000 unedited pages of memoirs when he died in 1910, together with handwritten notes saying that he did not want them to hit bookshops for at least a century, but in November, the University of California, Berkeley, where the manuscript is in a vault, will release the first volume of Mark Twain's three-volume autobiography. Scholars are divided as to why Twain wanted his autobiography kept under wraps for so long, with some believing it was because he wanted to talk freely about issues such as religion and politics. Michael Shelden, who this year published Man in White, an account of Twain's final years, says that some of his privately held views could have hurt his public image. 'He had doubts about God, and in the autobiography, he questions the imperial mission of the US in Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines,' says Shelden. 'He's also critical of [Theodore] Roosevelt, and takes the view that patriotism was the last refuge of the scoundrel. Twain also disliked sending Christian missionaries to Africa. He said they had enough business to be getting on with at home: with lynching going on in the South, he thought they should try to convert the heathens down there.' Interestingly enough, Twain had a cunning plan to beat the early 20th century copyright law with its short copyright terms. Twain planned to republish every one of his works the moment it went out of copyright with one-third more content, hoping that availability of such 'premium' version will make prints based on the out-of-copyright version less desirable on the market."

Comments

For the record, his stance on copyright

[WillAdams]

from a speech which he gave before Congress:

http://www.bpmlegal.com/cotwain.html

William

Re:As a competitor to Bill Gates, Mark Twain faile

[thomst]

Mark Twain aka Samuel Clemens was a person who came from a humble background and married into wealth, but his appetite for the fine things that money could bring exceeded whatever came his way by way of his wife's family.

Having worked as a newspaper "printer's devil", he saw his path to the riches required for the life style to which he had become accustomed in the Paige Compositor -- essentially a Victorian Era version of MS-Word implemented largely in hardware, making "leveraged" investments in this invention.

The Paige compositor failed in the marketplace, more sophisticated than its competitor the Linotype -- kind of like the tale of a "death march" failed software or computer hardware project some 100 years later. Twain lost all of his money and then money he didn't have. To make good on his debts, he went on a worldwide lecture tool, essentially doing impressions of Hal Holbrooke pretending to be Mark Twain.

Not only did the speaking fees from this grueling tour pay back his debts in full and then some, it made him immortal. Were it not for the fame of the speaking tour and connecting with audiences around the world with his personal appearances in a day before TV and cable and talk shows, he may as well been forgetten as many a 19'th century humorist.

So remember, what made Mark Twain a household word even into the 21'st Century was one, the man's greed, and two, an antecedant to the personal computer.

Uh ... no, not really. Not at all, in fact.

True, Twain put most the considerable wealth he had gained into the development of the Compositor (he himself estimated he spent $150,000 on it, but his biographer A. B. Paine estimated his investment at $190,000, and his friend William Dean Howells put the figure at $3000,000 - and these estimate are all in 19th century dollars). He believed there was both a demand and a need for it, based on his early career as a printer's devil. It did not "fail in the marketplace", however. In fact, only two prototypes were ever built, and the machine "collapsed" prior to its only demonstration before a group of investors in 1890.

It wasn't greed that motivated him. Like modern Internet billionaires investing in private space travel, he believed in the technology, and put his money where his mouth was.

As for the allegations of his being a "poor husband and neglectful father", nothing could be further from the truth. He adored his wife Livy, worshipped his daughters, and was devastated when his only son Langdon died of diptheria at age two. It was at Livy's insistence that he undertook a worldwide lecture tour to repay 100 cents on the dollar of the debts from his various bad investments (Paige's Compositor wasn't the only one), particularly the collapse of his publishing house, The Charles L. Webster Company. And, after their daughter Susy died of meningitis on a visit to their mansion in Hartford, Connecticut while Twain was on tour in Europe, he and Livy were so overcome with grief that they were never able to bring themselves to return to Hartford.

"Poor husband and neglectful father?" I don' theeng so, Quickstraw ...