All of the material was known to Paine (his penciled page numbers are on the manuscript pages). But he apparently realized that it interfered with his own plan for the autobiography: a sequence of early sketches and the Florentine Dictations in the order of their composition, followed by a selection of the Autobiographical Dictations from January through April 1906. He included the epigraph and the first section of “As from the Grave” at the beginning of his first volume, placing “The Latest Attempt” before the Florentine Dictations but calling it “Author’s Note.” He omitted entirely “An Early Attempt” and the second and third sections of “Preface. As from the Grave.”83 The prefatory pages, all in the Mark Twain Papers, are shown in sequence on the facing page and reproduced in facsimile in figures 2-13.

Since the “44 old type-written pages” are admittedly lost, how can we be sure that they were in fact a copy of “My Autobiography [Random Extracts from It]”? And how can we tell which of the six surviving Florentine Dictations were intended to follow “As from the Grave”?

The multiple typescripts of the January–August 1906 dictations hold the answer to both questions.

Two More Typescripts: TS2 and TS4

In his postscript to the 17 June letter to Howells, Clemens had said: “I think Miss Lyon told you the reason we couldn’t send you the Autobiography—there’s only one typed copy, & we had to have it for reference, to guard against repetitions. The making of a second copy is now begun; & so, we can presently begin to mail batches of it to you.”84 TS1 had been begun without any provision for a carbon copy. But Howells’s and Twichell’s interest in seeing the text earlier in April, and McClure’s interest in late May, made it increasingly clear that duplicates were vitally needed—hence the decision to begin a carbon copy of TS1 from that point, certainly no later than 11 June.85 But that still left more than eight hundred pages of dictation in a unique copy, much of which had been revised.

Clemens’s postscript shows that by 17 June “a second copy” had been commissioned. In fact, not one but two typed copies of TS1 were begun in mid- to late June, soon after the various prefaces had been created: the first typed by Hobby (TS2) and the second by an unidentified typist (TS4). These sequences are distinguishable by their differences in pagination and by minute differences in their typists’ styles. Collation demonstrates that TS2 and TS4 were both copied independently from the recently revised TS1, not one from the other. Both TS2 and TS4 originally began with the “Random Extracts” text, but both omit the “Early Attempt” preface written for it. TS4 includes the other three-part preface and four of the Florentine Dictations (“John Hay,” “Notes on ‘Innocents Abroad,’” “Robert Louis Stevenson and Thomas Bailey Aldrich,” and “Villa di Quarto”), and TS2 originally did so as well. But only parts of TS2 for these early texts survive: gaps in it (shown by missing page numbers) cannot always be certainly reconstructed, but all surviving evidence shows that the missing pages were identical in content to those of TS4, which is the only complete record of these initial elements in Clemens’s plan. This conjecture explains why the page numbers for the January-August 1906 dictations in TS2 and TS 4 are different from each other and consistently higher than the page numbers of TS1 for the corresponding dictation. TS 1 begins with the Autobiographical Dictation of 9 January, having been started before Clemens decided to include any of the early material.86

FIGURE 2. Manuscript page 1, Clemens’s title page.

FIGURE 3. Manuscript page 2, the “Early Attempt” preface introducing the “44 old type-written pages.”

FIGURE 4. Manuscript page 3, the instruction to insert what has now been identified as “My Autobiography [Random Extracts from It].”

FIGURE 5. Manuscript page 45, the first page of “The Latest Attempt” preface, numbered to continue the sequence after the inserted forty-four-page typescript. (The page number 9, and the numbers 10–17 on the following pages, were all added by Paine in pencil and were not part of Clemens’s plan.)

FIGURE 6. Manuscript page 46, the second page of “The Latest Attempt” preface.

FIGURE 7. Manuscript page 47, “THE FINAL (& RIGHT) PLAN,” originally placed immediately before the page inscribed with “Here begin the Florentine Dictations” (shown in figure 13).

FIGURE 8. The typed epigraph. In an earlier version, Clemens had deleted the title “A Text For All Biographies,” and added, “I will construct a text”; here he inserted “to precede the Autobiography; also a Preface, to follow said Text” and “(which are but the mute articulation of his feelings.)” He placed the page after “THE FINAL (& RIGHT) PLAN,” where it was transcribed in TS4. Clemens wrote “All usable” and “SMALL TYPE to save space” in the margin. The circled “I” in the top margin may have been written by either Clemens or Paine. The other writing on the page is Paine’s.

FIGURE 9. Manuscript page 48, “PREFACE. As from the Grave.” This page and the three that follow were first numbered 1–4. When Clemens inserted them into the sequence after page 47, he renumbered them 48–51. He moved the page originally numbered 48, containing “Here begin the Florentine Dictations,” to the end and renumbered it 52 (figure 13).

FIGURE 10.