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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."
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."
Exactly why the limits SHOULD be less then they are now. Back then, the length of the copyright period was actually promoting the publishing of new material.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
Whatever the substantive motives for the delay in publication are - that's probably also a nice publicity stunt; viral marketing is...old again?
One that hath name thou can not otter
In the olden days, authors games the law; they may not like the law, but still obeys the letters of the law. Today publishers BUY the law; they write them and their politicians force them upon the populace.
There are plenty of good husbands and good fathers in this world. There are very few writers of his calibre however. Saying that he was only a great man on the surface because he wasn't a great family man is like saying Alan Turing wasn't all that great because he was rubbish at water polo*.
For all I know Alan Turing was great at water polo, my point is that it is irrelevant.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
"I like that extension of copyright life to the author's life and fifty years afterward. I think that would satisfy any reasonable author, because it would take care of his children."
Sorry Mr. Twain but I don't think your daughters should be able to live in luxury, without working, while they collect money off your books for another 50 years. If you want to pass your existing money to them, that's fine, but the copyright should end the moment you die. Let your daughters go-out and work for themselves if they want to continue collecting money.
Copyright is intended to benefit the original laborer, not to set up an eternal money-making machine for people who did not do the original labor.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
There are plenty of good husbands and good fathers in this world. There are very few writers of his calibre however. Saying that he was only a great man on the surface because he wasn't a great family man is like saying Alan Turing wasn't all that great because he was rubbish at water polo*.
Not really. I know very few people that measure a man's greatness based on his water polo skills. But if you're not a good husband and father to the people you promised to be a good husband and father to, then you have lost a significant amount of respect from me.
If we said he was a "great writer," that's fine. But calling him a great man because of his writing is not merited, unless as a society, we actually want to ignore "humanity" faults in a person because of his literary work. Personally, I'd much rather have a great guy (great "man") as my neighbor than a great writer.
With all that said, I don't know much about him as a person, so I don't know if the original claim is true or not :)
A reason that copyright extends past death is to discourage murder to get access to copyrighted material.
I'm sure that's the spin policymakers put on it when they deformed copyright law. A better approach to discouraging murder would be to have set copyright terms...which coincidentally, was what we used to have. It used to be you could tell if a work was in copyright or not by looking at the copyright notice, subtracting it from the current year, and seeing if the result was greater than the copyright term. If you want the equivalent of "life plus fifty years" to benefit the kids, make copyright equal to the median life span + 50 years, and make that the set term. If you want more innovation, reduce that back to something reasonable, like 20 years.
Making copyright life+50 to avoid a mass of murdered authors is bullshit...that problem goes away as soon as you decouple copyright from an author's demise, as was its original implementation (in the US at least...in the UK, the earliest forms of proto-copyright went on forever, and some works still fall in the category).
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy