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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."
He had doubts about God ...
Indeed. See his later books like Letters from the Earth and The Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts (claymation here).
Twain also disliked sending Christian missionaries to Africa.
Oh I think that's putting it rather lightly. After reading about Twain's efforts to in King Leopold's Ghost, I read Twain's King Leopold's Soliloquy: A Defense of His Congo Rule in which Twain rips the Belgian King Leopold II apart (in my opinion the farce Twain made of Leopold is better than the more direct Crime of the Congo by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle). We seem to think that human rights and anthropology are modern day efforts when historically artists like Twain were very politically active and quite in tune with the truths of corrupt governments (the United States notwithstanding).
... and not until those involved, lampooned and criticized are long gone would the world be ready for this. This will most likely prove to be a delicious read indeed.
I assure you that in Twain's mind at the time of his death, he had many issues that he held from his writings -- most likely because he felt we weren't ready for that level of truth yet. Really the only question for me is whether or not he still felt the need to drench these memoirs in satire and wit when a hundred years from then he can just out and out straight to your face tell you what he feels as he recounts his life. I'd imagine he knew that saying some of this stuff one hundred years ago would be career ending or life threatening
My work here is dung.
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.
patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel
Especially when discussing the Patriot Act. Just saying.
Flexible bare-metal recovery for Linux/UNIX
"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."
If he was actually writing that additional content afterwards, he invented Release Early, Release Often.
If the content actually existed and it was a cynical ploy to sell more products, he invented the model Microsoft uses.
In either case, this puts his business acumen over half a century ahead of anyone else. That's genius.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
from a speech which he gave before Congress:
http://www.bpmlegal.com/cotwain.html
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Please don't read the rest of this post until a hundred years after I'm dead.
-----No reading below this point-----
You all suck.
Cheers,
-----No reading above this point (in case you're reading this upside down while you drive in circles with an IPad on the steering wheel).-----
From what I've been reading, all this material has been available for a long time to anyone who wanted to visit the library that holds it, and multiple biographies and even "autobiographies" have been published using information from it.
So there are unlikely to be any shocking new revelations here.
People will just get a chance to read things in his own words rather than the paraphrasing of a biographer.
G.
We finally get to hear his side of the story of meeting Guinan and Data.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
"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."
So George Lucas didn't come up with this first. Not that it makes it ok.
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.
I imagine if that were the case, massive numbers of readers would boycott Davinci Code. Although, is that really any different from how series like Babylon 5, Lost, and Stargate SG1 operate? You don't get the whole story at once... it's stretched out over 5-8 years.
Also: I think you misinterpreted Twain's point. He didn't "hold back" anything in his stories. He was simply planning to add more material, as a bonus. Since he died, that never happened.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
That would actually work well, since it would not protect the version as released, only the additions to the work. People can still freely use the old version as-is, or even as a basis for their own derivative works.
If you want to continue profiting from your intellectual property, release a new version every few years that's better than the one you released before. People can then choose between the older version (which is free of copyright encumbrance) or the newer version (which you've put work into to make it more desirable than the old version). Just make sure you do it better than anyone else, because the instant copyright runs out anyone can use it as the basis for new art.
This is the way it should be. If you want to keep getting paid for something you wrote 50 years ago, then you should keep working on it and improving it. Your older versions (for what is not currently, and should be, a reasonable definition of "older") should be available for everyone after you've had a reasonable amount of time to profit from it. "Years" is reasonable. "Generations" is not.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
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
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.
He also invented that little tie on the back of a men's dress vest that brings it in around the waist and was awarded a patent for it, but to no monetary gain. It originally had uses on other garments as patented and was sometimes detachable, but it's still there on many suit vests.
He also patented a self-pasting scrapbook which did sell really well and a trivia game.
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 ...
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