Finding Mark Twain’s Autobiography

“I’ve struck it!” Mark Twain wrote in a 1904 letter to a friend, “and I will give it away — to you. You will never know how much enjoyment you have lost until you get to dictating your autobiography.” Thus, Twain embarked on his “Final (and Right) Plan” for telling the story of his life. The instruction that many of these texts be withheld for 100 years meant that when they came out, he would be “dead, unaware, and indifferent.” The year 2010 marked the 100th anniversary of the author’s death, and the editors of the Mark Twain Project in The Bancroft Library issued through UC Press the first of a three-volume critical edition of the Autobiography of Mark Twain.