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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.
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).-----
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.
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Sadly he didn't secure a business model patent.
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
Yeah, but Twain was trying to increase the value of the work not decrease it.
There's no reference to water polo in his biographer's homepage.
Most probably because his prowess was such that any mention would steer the biography away from the purely "math guy" approach.
As I understand it Alan Turing did try water polo once but he pleaded with the powers the be that the sorrowful occasion be omitted from all records as it was such an unmitigated disaster. The horse drowned.
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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).
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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.
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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