'The Autobiography Of Mark Twain': Satire To Spare

by John McChesney, November 15, 2010 

Mark Twain changed the rules of American fiction when, in Huckleberry Finn, he let a redneck kid tell his story in his own dialect. But the brilliant satirist had a hard time figuring out what rules to break as he struggled for years to tell his own life story. Now, 100 years after his death, Mark Twain's autobiography is being published the way the author himself wished — from dictated stories collected by the University of California, Berkeley's Mark Twain Project. The first volume (of three) is out now, and the long-anticipated release is drawing attention from Twain-lovers around the world.

Photo: Ernest H. Mills/Hulton Archive - Author Samuel Langhorne Clemens, also known as Mark Twain, in July 1907

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"You will never know how much enjoyment you've lost until you get to dictating your biography." - Mark Twain

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'Wander At Your Free Will All Over Your Life'

Twain knew early on that he wanted to write an autobiography, but his first efforts to put his story on paper failed. He attributed his troubles to trying to follow a chronological calendar; a plan that, he wrote, "starts you at the cradle and drives you straight for the grave, with no side excursions permitted."

Then, in 1904, Twain hit upon the right way to tell his story. "Start at no particular time of your life," he wrote. "Wander at your free will all over your life; talk only about the thing that interests you for the moment; drop it at the moment its interest starts to pale." Naturally, he couldn't resist a comic hyperbole, adding, "It's the first time in history such a method has been discovered."

But Twain still couldn't wrap his head around how to tell the tale of his life — that is, until a few years later, when he wrote to his friend William Dean Howells about another eureka: dictation. "You will never know how much enjoyment you've lost until you get to dictating your biography," he wrote. "You'll be astonished at how like talk it is and how real it sounds."

Twain first tried dictating into Thomas Edison's new recording machine but didn't like it — he was a man who strutted stages all over the world, delivering extemporaneous spiels. Twain needed a live audience to speak to, not a bloodless machine. He eventually found that audience in stenographer Josephine Hobby and author Albert Bigelow Paine, his first biographer.

Paine says Twain often dictated from his bed, clad in a handsome silk dressing gown of rich Persian pattern, propped against great snowy pillows. He also got up, paced the floor and waved his arms as he poured out nearly 2,000 pages of typescript over three years.

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