Review is on very shaky legs, for the Colonel asked Mr. Clemens to wait for the autobiographical monies that are due him; to wait until the first of the year, for funds are low & he must borrow if he pays. It annoyed the King—for it is, as he says, “doing business through sentimental channels[”]—& he doesn’t like it atall. And it isn’t fair to the King.107

One result of this problem was that between 27 October 1907 and 27 September 1908 the North American Review chapters were reprinted, with newly commissioned illustrations, as a series in the weekly “Sunday Magazine,” a supplement that was syndicated in many large-circulation newspapers. Harvey himself proposed the syndication, but he implied that greater circulation was his only concern, not how much money it made. Lyon noted on 6 September 1907 that Harvey

got the King’s consent—his glad consent—to syndicate the autobiography in newspapers throughout the country & so the King will reach his “submerged clientele.” It will not bring him in a penny though. If any one gets anything it will be the Harpers & they will not get much for the newspapers do not pay much for matter—no matter how great—which has been already published. It will be a good advertisement for the King’s books though.108

Clemens hoped that this syndication would expose his work to a very different class of readers. He was undoubtedly pleased, and he even praised his portrait by F. Luis Mora that accompanied the first installment reprinted in “Sunday Magazine.”109 Many years later, on 28 October 1941, the artist John Thomson Willing, who was the art editor of the Associated Sunday Magazines at the time of the syndication, wrote to an unidentified correspondent in response to a “request for Mark Twain stories”:

I had charge of the serial issuing of his autobiography in the Sunday Magazine[,] a supplement to many important papers and aggregating nearly two million copies a week. This autobiography was first begun in The North American Review, edited by George Harvey,—published by Harper Bros Mr Clemens was much dissatisfied by the limited circulation of this Review and so arranged for the larger distribution of the newspapers. When I showed him the initial copy of our magazine with the heading Autobiography of Mark Twain as the title he turned to me and said “Barkis, you have left something out. It should have added ‘Hitherto confidentially circulated’”—referring to its having run in the Review—110

Autobiography as Literature (1909)

Not surprisingly, in 1907 and 1908 the intensity of Clemens’s interest in adding to the autobiography gradually abated. In each successive year the number of dictations declined by half, they became briefer, and the proportion of inserted clippings and other documents grew larger. By 1908 much of what he produced for the autobiography was actually original manuscript that he labeled as dictation. When on 24 December 1909 he wrote that because of Jean’s death “this Autobiography closes here,” he had in fact produced fewer than twelve new pages of typescript in the previous eight months.

In 1910, after Clemens’s death, Howells reported in My Mark Twain that at some point Clemens had “suddenly” told him he was no longer working on the autobiography, although Howells was unclear whether Clemens “had finished it or merely dropped it; I never asked.” He also recalled that at the outset of his work Clemens had intended the autobiography to be “a perfectly veracious record of his life and period,” but he now admitted that “as to veracity it was a failure; he had begun to lie, and that if no man ever yet told the truth about himself it was because no man ever could.”111 Of course, by 1904 Clemens had already convinced himself, by experiment, that an autobiography “consists mainly of extinctions of the truth,” even if “the remorseless truth is there, between the lines.” And in April 1906 he had said in one of his dictations,

I have been dictating this autobiography of mine daily for three months; I have thought of fifteen hundred or two thousand incidents in my life which I am ashamed of, but I have not gotten one of them to consent to go on paper yet. I think that that stock will still be complete and unimpaired when I finish these memoirs, if I ever finish them. I believe that if I should put in all or any of those incidents I should be sure to strike them out when I came to revise this book.112

We have seen that in 1898 Clemens had been so discouraged by this insight that he (temporarily) decided to change the very nature of his autobiography. But there is good reason to suppose that by the time of his death he had reached a more enlightened understanding of what his or anyone else’s autobiography could accomplish. In mid-1909 he was asked whether his remarks about the Tennessee land as published in the North American Review were true. “Yes,” he replied, “literarily they are true, that is to say they are a product of my impressions—recollections. As sworn testimony they are not worth anything; they are merely literature.”113

A hundred years have now passed since Clemens’s death. It certainly seems fitting that his plan for publishing the Autobiography of Mark Twain in its entirety should just now be recovered from his vast accumulation of papers, and that the Autobiography’s standing and value as “literature” be at last recognized. This edition, prepared by his editors (if not his “heirs and assigns”), relies on the eloquent evidence of historical documents to understand and carry out his wishes for this, his last major literary work. His long-standing plan to speak as truthfully as possible “from the grave” is no longer just a plan. And as Colonel Harvey predicted more than a hundred years ago, the Autobiography is being published both as printed volumes and “by electrical method,” a fact that would no doubt have appealed to Mark Twain’s “vivid imagination.”114

Harriet Elinor Smith
Mark Twain Project, Berkeley

1. “The Latest Attempt,” one of the prefaces written to introduce the final form of the autobiography; see p. 220.

2. “Mark Twain’s Bequest,” London Times, 23 May 1899, 4, in Scharnhorst 2006, 334. All of the abbreviations and short forms of citation used in these notes are fully defined in References.

3.