. We have read perhaps a quarter of the million of words which will finally be written, and are convinced that a life story of such surpassing interest was never told before.97

Reading the above in proof, Clemens facetiously professed himself “troubled” and suggested to Mary Rogers that she write a letter of protest to Harvey, even providing her with a text. She was to say that Harvey’s “prodigal, even extravagant” praises “sounded cold & indifferent” to him. “He is almost morbidly fond of compliments, & he realizes that these are good ones, but thinks they are over-cautious & thin. When we of the family butter him we do not do it with a knife, we use a trowel.”98

Harvey’s first round of selections, the second through sixth installments, appeared in the Review between 21 September and 16 November. According to Clemens, during his August visit he had actually earmarked a total of twenty-four selections—“a year’s lot”—drawing on the dictations of January, March, and April 1906, “John Hay,” and the second part of the “Random Extracts” sketch for installments 7–8 and 10–13, published through 1 March 1907.99 Later material, from the dictations of October 1906 through February 1907, began to appear in installments 14 and 15, published on 15 March and 5 April 1907. Hobby made only one additional batch of TS3, for installment 16, published 19 April 1907. Apart from the dictation of 21 May 1906 (“My experiences as an author . . . ”), which had been used in installment 2, no material from the dictations of May through August 1906 was published in the Review.100 In those months Clemens dictated some rather stringent comments about religion, business, and various of his associates—comments he had no intention of publishing during his lifetime. Besides, there were soon so many excerpts stockpiled that the making of further selections could be safely postponed.

This basic work flow remained in place for the next sixteen months. Clemens continued to revise his typescripts, censoring or “softening” them as needed. For example, he deleted the phrase “‘Stud’ Williams was his society name”; altered “Plasmon thieves” to “Plasmon buccaneers”; changed his description of “Dr. Meredith’s two ripe old-maid sisters” to “Dr. G.’s two middle-aged maiden sisters”; altered “a dying parishioner” to “a fictitious ailing parishioner”; and deleted “God forgive me.”101 The revised typescripts were sent to the Review and marked for house style by editor David A. Munro; after typesetting, the typescripts were returned to Clemens along with the galley proofs ready for correction. The editorial relationship was easygoing: Munro and Harvey offered very few substantive revisions, and Clemens often took a joking tone in his responses. He occasionally addressed remarks to Munro in the margins of the printer’s copy or the galley proofs; pressing matters might be handled by mail and telegram and, conceivably, by telephone.102

Critical Reception and “Sunday Magazine” (1906 to 1908)

Between September and December 1906 brief excerpts from the early North American Review “Chapters from My Autobiography” appeared in several newspapers, accompanied by a scattering of complimentary remarks. The New York Times, for example, reprinted the passage from the first installment (excerpted from “My Autobiography [Random Extracts from It]”) in which Clemens identified James Lampton as the real Colonel Sellers, commenting that the passage was “noteworthy” as an example of “honest self-revelation.” Two weeks later the Times remarked that the second installment, the “story of how G. W. Carleton refused Mr. Clemens’s first book and twenty years afterward called himself for so doing ‘the prize ass of the nineteenth century,’” was “a good story.”103 Other reprinted passages included the Florentine Dictation about Robert Louis Stevenson; the emotional descriptions of Olivia and Susy; the humorous episode about the burglar alarm in the Hartford house; and the essay about dueling.104 A reviewer in the Louisville, Kentucky, Courier-Journal (possibly its editor, Clemens’s lifelong friend and distant relative Henry Watterson) called the autobiography “delightful,” and while conceding that Clemens did not claim to be “strictly speaking a historian,” went on to correct the inaccuracies in his account of Jeremiah and Sherrard Clemens.105 The Washington Post characterized the installments as “filled with his gentle humor,” and an editor of Pearson’s Magazine noted:

It is the old Mark Twain that speaks to us again, not the solemn reformer and critic whose heavy essays have so long afflicted a good-natured and affectionate public. . . . We see him frolicking with the creatures of his fancy, stirring the dust of their droll adventures and wagging his venerable head at their quaint sayings. And then we see him kneeling beside the graves of his wife and child, recalling their every look and word, and we forget the world’s great humorist, knowing only the father, the husband, the true American gentleman.106

None of the notices of the autobiography found in contemporary newspapers and journals, however, offered any substantial critical commentary or analysis, and after the early months of 1907, the installments received little attention.

For all Clemens’s insistence on publishing the Autobiography only long after his death, the excerpts in the North American Review were surprisingly important to him. Just how important became clear only when he realized how few readers had actually seen the magazine text. On 30 July 1907, nine months after the installments began, Lyon made the following entry in her journal:

Evidently the N.A.