The remaining volumes in this edition will include all the dictations he created between April 1906 and October 1909, likewise arranged chronologically, the whole concluding with the “Closing Words of My Autobiography,” a manuscript about the death of his youngest daughter, Jean.

PRELIMINARY MANUSCRIPTS AND DICTATIONS

Autobiographical Fiction and Fictional Autobiography

Autobiography as a literary form had a special fascination for Mark Twain. Long before he had given serious thought to writing his own, he had published both journalism and fiction that were, in the most straightforward way, autobiographical. From the earliest juvenilia in his brother’s Hannibal, Missouri, newspaper (1851–53) to his personal brand of journalism in Nevada and California (1862–66), he played endlessly with putting himself at the center of what he wrote. Twenty years and nine books later, in October 1886, he acknowledged (and oversimplified) the result: “Yes, the truth is, my books are simply autobiographies. I do not know that there is an incident in them which sets itself forth as having occurred in my personal experience which did not so occur. If the incidents were dated, they could be strung together in their due order, & the result would be an autobiography.”11 He was thinking of his travel books and personal narratives—The Innocents Abroad, Roughing It, A Tramp Abroad, and Life on the Mississippi—the only books up to that point in which he set forth anything “as having occurred” in his own experience. To be sure he also made extensive fictional use of that experience. The factual basis of characters and situations in works like The Gilded Age, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has been thoroughly documented, and the autobiographical content is obvious in dozens of shorter works like “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed” and “My First Lie and How I Got Out of It,” even when they are not entirely factual.12

More germane to Clemens’s thinking about his own autobiography is his interest in fictional autobiography—that is, fictions in the shape and form of an autobiography. Mark Twain’s (Burlesque) Autobiography was written in late 1870 and published in pamphlet form in March 1871. Mark Twain tells us that his own parents were “neither very poor nor conspicuously honest,” and that almost all of his ancestors were born to be hanged—and for the most part were hanged. An even briefer “burlesque” called simply “An Autobiography” appeared in the Aldine magazine in April 1871: “I was born November 30th, 1835. I continue to live, just the same.”13 The whole sketch takes fewer than two hundred words and pointedly leaves the reader as ignorant of the facts as before.

Burlesque implies familiarity with genuine autobiographies, despite what Clemens told William Dean Howells in 1877 (“I didn’t know there were any but old Franklin’s & Benvenuto Cellini’s”). Benjamin Franklin’s didactic bent made him a lifelong target of Mark Twain’s ridicule. But he thought Cellini’s autobiography the “most entertaining of books,” and he admired the daring frankness of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions and Giovanni Giacomo Casanova’s Mémoires, as well as Samuel Pepys’s Diary, which Paine said was the book Clemens “read and quoted most.”14

In 1871 he proposed writing “an Autobiography of Old Parr, the gentleman who lived to be 153 years old,” but apparently he never did so.15 In the summer of 1876 he wrote four hundred pages of a work he was then calling “Huck Finn’s Autobiography.” And in March 1877, he told Howells he was writing such a work about his own older brother: “I began Orion’s autobiography yesterday & am charmed with the work. I have started him at 18, printer’s apprentice, soft & sappy, full of fine intentions & shifting religions & not aware that he is a shining ass.” He assigned various real incidents of Orion’s life and aspects of his character to an apprentice named Bolivar, and wrote more than a hundred pages before abandoning the project.16

In 1880, Orion’s decision to write a real autobiography prompted Clemens to suggest that he instead “write two books which it has long been my purpose to write, but I judge they are so far down on my docket that I shan’t get to them in this life. I think the subjects are perfectly new. One is ‘The Autobiography of a Coward,’ & the other ‘Confessions of a Life that was a Failure.’ ” The object here was not burlesque, but rather a kind of thought experiment to test the difficulty of telling the whole truth in an autobiographical narrative—in this case, by shielding it behind a deliberate fiction.

My plan was simple—to take the absolute facts of my own life & tell them simply & without ornament or flourish, exactly as they occurred, with this difference, that I would turn every courageous action (if I ever performed one) into a cowardly one, & every success into a failure. You can do this, but only in one way; you must banish all idea of an audience—for no man ^few men^ can straitly & squarely confess shameful things to others—you must tell your story to yourself, & to no other; you must not use your own name, for that would keep you from telling shameful things, too.

Another version of this scheme Clemens said was more difficult, to “tell the story of an abject coward who is unconscious that he is a coward,” and to do the same for “an unsuccessful man.”

In these cases the titles I have suggested would not be used. This latter plan is the one I should use. I should confine myself to my own actual experiences (to invent would be to fail) & I would name everybody’s actual name & locality & describe his character & actions unsparingly, then change these names & localities after the book was finished. To use fictitious names, & localities while writing is a befogging & confusing thing.

The inspiration for both of these ideas was obviously two autobiographies that Clemens admired.

The supremest charm in Casanova’s Memoires (they are not printed in English) is, that he frankly, flowingly, & felicitously tells the dirtiest & vilest & most contemptible things on himself, without ever suspecting that they are other than things which the reader will admire & applaud. . . . Rousseau confesses to masturbation, theft, lying, shameful treachery, & attempts made upon his person by Sodomites. But he tells it as a man who is perfectly aware of the shameful nature of these things, whereas your coward & your Failure should be happy & sweet & unconsciousof their own contemptibility.17

Clemens himself seems not to have attempted what he urged Orion to try, but it is obvious he was thinking about the challenge of writing with the perfect frankness he admired in these writers. The question of how fully he could tell the truth about himself, and especially to what extent he could confess what he regarded as his own shameful behavior, occupied him off and on throughout work on the Autobiography.

The First Attempts (1876 and 1877)

Clemens’s plan to write his own autobiography is more or less distinct from these fictional uses of the form. The first indication that he had such a plan survives only in the report of a conversation that took place when he was forty. Mrs. James T.