Autobiographical Writings

An intimate look at Mark Twain that only he himself could offer, edited by highly respected Twain scholar R. Kent Rasmussen

A must-have for all lovers of Mark Twain, this selection of his autobiographical writings opens a rare window onto the writer’s life, particularly his early years. Born on November 30, 1835, in Florida, Missouri, Samuel Langhorne Clemens first used the pseudonym Mark Twain while a journalist in Nevada in 1863. When his first major book, The Innocents Abroad, appeared six years later, he began what would become one of the most celebrated and influential careers in American letters. Autobiographical Writings will help readers know the author intimately and appreciate why, a century after his death, he remains so vital and appealing.

For more than sixty-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,500 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.“To [Clemens's] fascinating recollections Rasmussen contributes an informative Introduction that courageously takes up the issue of Samuel Clemens's veracity, a fuller-than-usual chronology of Clemens's life, an up-to-date bibliography of scholarship devoted to his autobiographical writings, and a surprisingly ample "Glossary" that identifies everyone and everything from Susan Crane to John Hay to the Monday Evening Club to the starboard side of a river vessel… a highly usable and deeply enjoyable compilation of some of Twain's very best prose.”
—Mark Twain Forum

“Rasmussen seems to have been born with the destiny of bringing order and light to Twain scholarship… So now he’s written yet another book that I would say ought to be near to hand for any scholar doing work on Sam Clemens, the biographical individual.”
—Lawrence Berkove, University of Michigan-DearbornMark Twain (1835–1910) was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in Florida, Missouri. Starting out as typesetter, he went on to work as a steamboat pilot, prospector, and journalist before publishing his first major book, The Innocents Abroad.

R. Kent Rasmussen is the author or editor of nine books on Mark Twain, including the award-winning Mark Twain A to Z, as well as more than a dozen other books. He lives in Southern California.

PENGUIN CLASSICS

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL WRITINGS

SAMUEL LANGHORNE CLEMENS was born on November 30, 1835, in Florida, Missouri, a village about forty miles southwest of Hannibal, the Mississippi River town that he would later celebrate, writing as Mark Twain. In 1853 he left home to work as an itinerant printer and four years later became a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi. With his piloting career cut short by the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, he went west and prospected and worked as a journalist in Nevada and California. In February 1863 he signed the pseudonym “Mark Twain” for the first time in an article for Virginia City’s Territorial Enterprise. His trip to Europe and the Holy Land in 1867 became the basis of his first major book, The Innocents Abroad (1869), which made him famous. Roughing It (1872), his account of experiences in the Far West, was followed by a satirical novel, The Gilded Age (1873), Sketches: New and Old (1875), The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), A Tramp Abroad (1880), The Prince and the Pauper (1881), Life on the Mississippi (1883), and his masterpiece, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885). In 1891, he was compelled by mounting expenses to move his family abroad. In 1895–96, he undertook a round-the-world lecture tour to pay off creditors of his bankrupt publishing firm and then remained in Europe until 1900. His fortunes mended, he returned to America and found himself celebrated—not only for heroically pulling himself out of debt but also for his uncompromising stands against injustice and imperialism. He died in his final home in Redding, Connecticut, on April 21, 1910.

R. KENT RASMUSSEN has written and edited eight other books on Mark Twain, including the forthcoming Dear Mark Twain: Letters from His Readers, as well as many books on other subjects. He is best known for his award-winning Mark Twain A to Z (recently revised as the two-volume Critical Companion to Mark Twain) and The Quotable Mark Twain. He holds a doctorate in history from UCLA and recently retired from his job as a reference book editor in Southern California.

MARK TWAIN

Autobiographical
Writings

Edited with an Introduction by
R. KENT RASMUSSEN

PENGUIN BOOKS

Introduction

Samuel Langhorne Clemens, the man best known to the world as Mark Twain, is one of the most autobiographical of American writers. His presence can be felt in almost everything he wrote. Overtly or through proxies, he placed himself in most of his essays and nonfiction books and built much of his fiction around his experiences. He was ever his own favorite subject and his thoughts often went back to his own past, so it should not be surprising that he eventually turned to composing autobiography—initially by hand and later by dictation. During the last years of his life, his daily autobiographical dictations* were becoming an obsession. According to his autobiography itself, he told his close friend William Dean Howells, “if I should talk to the stenographer two hours a day for a hundred years, I should still never be able to set down a tenth part of the things which have interested me in my lifetime.” Moreover, his autobiography would not be a mere book but an entire library—and not a small one, either:

if I should live long enough, the set of volumes could not be contained merely in a city, it would require a State, and… there would not be any multi-billionaire alive, perhaps, at any time during its existence who would be able to buy a full set, except on the instalment plan.

In all this, he was, of course, exaggerating. However, he was serious about composing a big autobiography. By the time he died in early 1910, the manuscripts constituting what he regarded as his formal autobiography had grown to nearly one-half million words. He led a long and complex life and had much to tell. Moreover, the history of his attempts to write his autobiography is a long and complex story in itself.

BACKGROUND

Mark Twain’s career as a professional writer commenced during the early 1860s, when he worked as a reporter for Nevada and California newspapers and contributed stories and sketches to literary magazines. By the time he left the Far West at the end of 1866, he had built a modest reputation as a skillful humorist but was still several years away from thinking of himself as an author. That transformation began with the publication in 1869 of The Innocents Abroad, his best-selling account of his travels in Europe and the Holy Land with the Quaker City steamship excursion two years earlier. The travel letters he wrote for newspapers during that trip and the book that grew out of those letters earned him a national reputation. Publication of Roughing It (1872), about his experiences in the Far West during the early 1860s, completed his transformation from journalist to author. His reputation then grew steadily, as he published The Gilded Age (1873), The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), A Tramp Abroad (1880), The Prince and the Pauper (1881), Life on the Mississippi (1883), Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884/1885), A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), and other books, along with a steady stream of magazine sketches, short stories, and essays. Meanwhile, he further enhanced his reputation by undertaking a number of extended lecture tours. Even before he reached the age of forty, he had an international reputation and was regarded as an important American author—albeit one who was best known as a humorist.

Mark Twain’s interest in writing autobiography began relatively early. In 1870, for example, he wrote about the disastrous effect of the Tennessee land that his father had bequeathed to his family. It was a subject to which he would return several times more than thirty-five years later. In the meantime, he made fictional use of that part of his family’s history in The Gilded Age, a partly autobiographical novel he coauthored with his Hartford, Connecticut, neighbor Charles Dudley Warner. In 1877, he wrote a brief memoir about the time he spent in Florida, Missouri, as a child. Through the next three decades, he made other attempts at starting an autobiography, but none of them succeeded in holding his interest. The first major breakthrough came in 1904, while he was staying in Florence, Italy, where he had taken his family for the sake of his wife’s health. Using his secretary Isabel Lyon as a scribe, he discovered that he could efficiently dictate his autobiography. Lyon was not a proficient stenographer, but she was an appreciative listener who satisfied Mark Twain’s need for an audience. Raised in a tradition of oral storytelling, he was a natural speaker.

On January 16, 1904, Mark Twain wrote excitedly from Florence to William Dean Howells:

I’ve struck it! And I will give it away—to you. You will never know how much enjoyment you have lost until you get to dictating your autobiography; then you will realize, with a pang, that you might have been doing it all your life if you had only had the luck to think of it. And you will be astonished (& charmed) to see how like talk it is, & how real it sounds, & how well & compactly & sequentially it constructs itself, & what a dewy & breezy & woodsy freshness it has, & what a darling & worshipful absence of the signs of starch, & flatiron, & labor & fuss & the other artificialities!…

Try it, & you will see. But with a long-hand scribe, not with a stenographer. At least not at first. Not until you get your hand in, I should say. There’s a good deal of waiting, of course, but that is no matter; soon you do not mind it.

Miss Lyon does the scribing, & is an inspiration, because she takes so much interest in it. I dictate from 10.30 till noon. The result is about 1500 words. Then I am a free man & can read & smoke the rest of the day, for there’s not a correction to be made.…

The death of Mark Twain’s wife, Livy, the following June deeply unsettled him and ended his experiments in composing autobiography. However, after he returned to the United States and had time to settle down, an unexpected development brought him back to that work. In January 1906, free-lance writer Albert Bigelow Paine approached him about becoming his biographer. Mark Twain not only granted Paine’s request with some enthusiasm, he also quickly invited Paine to move into his New York City home to allow Paine convenient access to his papers. Soon Paine was interviewing him regularly to gather information for his biography, and Mark Twain engaged a professional stenographer, Josephine Hobby, to record their interviews in shorthand and later make typescripts of them. Paine’s questions renewed his interest in creating his own autobiography, and the interview sessions were transformed into autobiography dictation sessions, with Paine helping to provide focus and inspiration.

Over the next two years, Mark Twain conducted about 250 dictation sessions. Early on, he developed a technique that he explains in the opening of the first installment of the North American Review chapters:

a form and method whereby the past and the present are constantly brought face to face, resulting in contrasts which newly fire up the interest all along, like contact of flint with steel.…

Howells was here yesterday afternoon, and I told him the whole scheme of this autobiography and its apparently systemless system—only apparently systemless, for it is not really that. It is a deliberate system, and the law of the system is that I shall talk about the matter which for the moment interests me, and cast it aside and talk about something else the moment its interest for me is exhausted. It is a system which follows no charted course and is not going to follow any such course. It is a system which is a complete and purposed jumble—a course which begins nowhere, follows no specified route, and can never reach an end while I am alive…

The almost inevitable result of Mark Twain’s free-form dictations is an enormous manuscript with almost no discernible shape. When he suggested changing subjects the moment his interest in what he is talking about fades, he was not exaggerating. His dictations switch subjects frequently, moving their narratives about in space and back and forth in time. The absence of a chronological framework is particularly noticeable. In 1906, he serialized a portion of his dictations in the North American Review under the title “Chapters from My Auobiography.” The first installment opened with some discussion of Clemens family ancestors, but the series did not get around to discussing Mark Twain’s own birth until the thirteenth installment. When the first edition of the autobiography in book form (edited by Paine) was published in 1924, a review in the Dallas Morning News of October 19 called it

surely the most strangely put together of all memoirs. It is a work of shreds and patches, a hodge-podge of miscellaneous papers and dictations written in various parts of the world—Vienna, Florence, New York City, Dublin (New Hampshire)—and in as many different manners as could well be found in a book not an anthology. Still worse, there is no sort of chronology; each new chapter begins with whatever subject happens to come into the muser’s mind. When after a time, the book becomes a combination of diary and autobiography, there is a semblance of order and the author claims again and again he has at last hit on the way to write this sort of thing. This is the best way because most natural. Well, it is natural. But the vaunted “method” is simply to have no method.

The “miscellaneous papers” to which the review alludes are texts Paine added to the dictations and were not part of what Mark Twain considered to be his formal autobiography. However, the points the review makes accurately describe the dictations. In any case, these eccentricities did not greatly vex the reviewer, who went on to say,

This is in no sense a complaint, only the statement of fact—of a fact that must surprise the reader, at least mildly. What a life the man led. Mississippi pilot; in Nevada and California when the exploits of the Forty-Niners were recent history; newspaper correspondent in Hawaii; around the world on the Quaker City; long seasons of residence abroad… And what a succession of people he knew about whom one is curious…

Despite all the effort Mark Twain invested in composing “autobiography,” little of what he recorded resembles what is generally regarded as true autobiography. Indeed, it might even be argued that this most autobiographical of American writers never actually wrote an autobiography. This is not to say that he did not write about his own life. He truly was his own favorite subject, and what he called his autobiography is filled with fascinating and often moving reminiscences of his past. What he did not record was an introspective narrative connecting events, finding patterns, or, more generally, seeking an understanding of how he came to be the person he was.

TRUTH

In September 1906, the fortnightly North American Review published the first in the series of twenty-five “Chapters” from Mark Twain’s autobiography. The widely publicized event quickly attracted newspaper comments, which generally expressed eager anticipation. An editorial in the September 14 issue of California’s San Jose Mercury News said of the developing autobiography, “This ought to be the best of his books. His life has had variety enough and adventure enough to make good reading when told in his own inimitable way.” The paper’s observation was accurate: Variety was never lacking in Mark Twain’s life, and the autobiographical chapters that were eventually published would not disappoint readers. At the same time, however, cautious skepticism crept into some commentaries. By 1906, the name Mark Twain had become so closely associated with humor and hoaxes that many people were unsure how seriously to take anything he wrote. When the Mercury News expressed the hope that Mark Twain’s forthcoming autobiography would reveal “how much of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn and the Innocents Abroad is founded upon his own history and how much is fiction,” it also added,

Or it may be that, led astray by his picturesque imagination, he may add another book, a mixture of fact and fancy, to the old list. Unless he takes a solemn affidavit to the truth of all that he writes there will be some people suspicious of his autobiography.

There were reasons aplenty to be skeptical about the veracity of Mark Twain’s autobiography. The grossly exaggerated estimate of how large his autobiography would become that he gave to Howells appears in the autobiography itself. Indeed, it opens the first chapter of “Chapters from My Autobiography.” Furthermore, it not only contains a ludicrous exaggeration, it also leads into another statement obviously stretching the truth:

Howells applauded, and was full of praises and endorsement, which was wise in him and judicious. If he had manifested a different spirit, I would have thrown him out of the window. I like criticism, but it must be my way.

It is safe to assume that Mark Twain would not really have thrown Howells out a window. The remark is merely a bit of silly fun. Nevertheless, it alerts readers not to take Mark Twain at his word for all that follows. It is a timely warning, as the very next paragraph in that first chapter opens with an even more doubtful statement about the Clemens family ancestry: “Back of the Virginia Clemenses is a dim procession of ancestors stretching back to Noah’s time. According to tradition, some of them were pirates and slavers in Elizabeth’s time.” No family can trace its ancestry back to Noah’s time, and the business about pirates and slavers is pure poppycock. However, these remarks lead into a more concrete discussion about an ancestor named Geoffrey Clement, who helped sentence England’s King Charles I to death in 1649 and consequently “made me vain.” This story sounds more reasonable, especially when one knows that Clement really was a historical figure involved in King Charles’s execution. Was he, however, an ancestor of Mark Twain’s? Probably not, as no evidence of a family connection has yet been found.

The Mercury News editorial’s suggestion that “some people” would be suspicious of Mark Twain’s autobiography was an understatement. People were, indeed, suspicious of it in 1906. One such person was Mark Twain’s biographer Paine. As a knowledgeable participant in most of the autobiographical dictation sessions, no one was better placed than he to judge the authenticity of what Mark Twain said. The monumental biography of Mark Twain he published in 1912 contains vivid first-hand descriptions of dictation sessions and recalls his growing suspicion that what he was hearing was not quite right:

It was not for several weeks that I began to realize that these marvelous reminiscences bore only an atmospheric relation to history; that they were aspects of biography rather than its veritable narrative, and built largely—sometimes wholly—from an imagination that, with age, had dominated memory, creating details, even reversing them, yet with a perfect sincerity of purpose on the part of the narrator to set down the literal and unvarnished truth. It was his constant effort to be frank and faithful to fact, to record, to confess, and to condemn without stint. If you wanted to know the worst of Mark Twain you had only to ask him for it. He would give it, to the last syllable—worse than the worst, for his imagination would magnify it and adorn it with new iniquities, and if he gave it again, or a dozen times, he would improve upon it each time, until the thread of history was almost impossible to trace through the marvel of that fabric; and he would do the same for another person just as willingly. Those vividly real personalities that he marched and countermarched before us were the most convincing creatures in the world, the most entertaining, the most excruciatingly humorous, or wicked, or tragic; but, alas, they were not always safe to include in a record that must bear a certain semblance to history. They often disagreed in their performance, and even in their characters, with the documents in the next room, as I learned by and by when those records, disentangled, began to rebuild the structure of the years.

His gift of dramatization had been exercised too long to be discarded now. The things he told of Mrs. Clemens and of Susy were true—marvelously and beautifully true, in spirit and in aspect—and the actual detail of these mattered little in such a record. The rest was history only as Roughing It is history, or the Tramp Abroad; that is to say, it was fictional history, with fact as a starting-point. In a prefatory note to these volumes I have quoted Mark Twain’s own lovely and whimsical admission, made once when he realized his deviations:

“When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it happened or not; but I am getting old, and soon I shall remember only the latter.” (chapter 239)

Paine went on to modify his remarks on the truthfulness of the autobiography:

I do not wish to say, by any means, that his so-called autobiography is a mere fairy tale. It is far from that. It is amazingly truthful in the character-picture it represents of the man himself. It is only not reliable—and it is sometimes even unjust—as detailed history. Yet, curiously enough, there were occasional chapters that were photographically exact, and fitted precisely with the more positive, if less picturesque, materials. It is also true that such chapters were likely to be episodes intrinsically so perfect as to not require the touch of art.

In the talks which we usually had, when the dictations were ended and Miss Hobby had gone, I gathered much that was of still greater value. Imagination was temporarily dispossessed, as it were, and, whether expounding some theory or summarizing some event, he cared little for literary effect, and only for the idea and the moment immediately present.

It was at such times that he allowed me to make those inquiries we had planned in the beginning, and which apparently had little place in the dictations themselves. Sometimes I led him to speak of the genesis of his various books, how he had come to write them, and I think there was not a single case where later I did not find his memory of these matters almost exactly in accord with the letters of the moment, written to Howells or [Joseph] Twichell, or to some member of his family. Such reminiscence was usually followed by some vigorous burst of human philosophy, often too vigorous for print, too human, but as dazzling as a search-light in its revelation.

Later biographers have shared Paine’s suspicions. Justin Kaplan, for example, in his Pulitzer Prize–winning biography, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain (1966), summed up Mark Twain’s autobiography as “that piece of near-fiction.” However, that harsh judgment did not lessen Kaplan’s admiration for the work. “As a record of magnificent talk, magical, hilarious, savage, and tender,” he added, “the autobiography is a major work, Mark Twain’s last, a sprawling and shapeless masterpiece whose unity is in the accent and rhythm and attack of his voice.” A still later biographer, Forrest Robinson, brings a different perspective. In The Author-Cat: Clemens’s Life in Fiction (2007), he argues that Mark Twain is more truthful about his life in his fictional writings than he is in his autobiography.

One root of distrust in Mark Twain’s truthfulness goes back to a characteristic trait of much of his writing—a cavalier disregard for fine distinctions among literary forms and genres. Stories, sketches, essays, and memoirs were often seemingly as one to him. Usually more interested in telling a good yarn than in sticking to the petrified truth, he was always willing to overlook inconvenient differences between fact and fiction. This tendency is most evident in his travel books, which were ostensibly factual descriptions of places he visited and the experiences he had during his travels. Roughing It, one of the books to which Paine alluded, is a prime example. In that lively volume about his Western adventures, lines between fact and fiction are often too thin to discern what Mark Twain himself actually did and what his anonymous narrator claims he merely did. Mark Twain wrote the book in the first person and clearly built it around his own experiences. However, from the book’s opening paragraph it is apparent that its unnamed narrator is not quite Mark Twain himself:

My brother had just been appointed Secretary of Nevada Territory… and the title of “Mr. Secretary” gave to the great position an air of wild and imposing grandeur. I was young and ignorant, and I envied my brother. I coveted his distinction and his financial splendor, but particularly and especially the long, strange journey he was going to make, and the curious new world he was going to explore. He was going to travel! I never had been away from home, and that word “travel” had a seductive charm for me.

Typical of Mark Twain’s travel writings, Roughing It exaggerates its narrator’s youthfulness and inexperience. In 1861, when he went to Nevada with his brother, he was twenty-five years old and was already impressively accomplished and well traveled. After spending several years working as a journeyman printer in midwestern and eastern cities, including St. Louis, Cincinnati, New York, and Philadelphia, he had spent four years piloting steamboats between St. Louis and New Orleans on the Mississippi. As a pilot, he had already earned a larger salary than his brother would ever receive. Roughing It sustains its narrator’s youthful greenhorn pose throughout its early chapters, while embellishing Mark Twain’s actual experiences with exaggerations, distortions, and outright inventions that make the narrative much livelier and more vivid than a straightforward account could possibly be. The result is a mixture that may justifiably be classified equally as both memoir and fiction. One thing it is not, however, is autobiography. The same may be said of The Innocents Abroad, A Tramp Abroad, and parts of Life on the Mississippi. Nonetheless, as extracts reprinted in the present volume show, each of those books contains patches of authentic autobiography.

Modern readers of Mark Twain generally know enough about him not to be greatly troubled by his mixing of fact and fiction in his books. His contemporary readers, though, were less comfortable with it. In December 1880, he received a letter from a New York cheese merchant named Charles W. Rhodes, who had read The Innocents Abroad, Roughing It, and other works and was just finishing A Tramp Abroad, Mark Twain’s account of his most recent travels in western Europe. Rhodes wished to know

by what rule a fellow can infallibly judge when you are lying and when you are telling the truth. I write this in case you intend to afflict an innocent and unoffending public with any more such works. I would suggest the next volume be published with the truth printed in italics.

Mark Twain evidently merely laughed at this letter, for on it he jotted, “Ha!—ha! captured another idiot.” He did not, of course, adopt Rhodes’s suggestion about using italics, so his readers were left wondering which passages in his writings to believe. Always fascinated with the concept of truth, Mark Twain was doubtless aware of his own reputation. In a discussion of lying in Following the Equator (1897), his book about his round-the-world lecture tour in 1895–1896, he ruefully remarked, “My own luck has been curious all my literary life; I never could tell a lie that anybody would doubt, nor a truth that anybody would believe.” Is it, then, any wonder that readers approached his serialized autobiography with some skepticism in 1906?

EDITIONS OF THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY

In 2010, the University of California Press issued the first of three projected volumes of the superbly edited Autobiography of Mark Twain, prepared by the editors of Berkeley’s Mark Twain Papers. This publication is accurately billed as the first “complete and authoritative” edition of the autobiography, that is, the first to include every manuscript and dictation that Mark Twain himself regarded as part of his formal autobiography. It is also the first edition to arrange the material strictly as he intended, which is essentially the order in which he created it.

Although Mark Twain directed that his autobiography not be published until one hundred years after he died, four different versions were published between 1906 and 1959. None was close to being complete or authoritative. Not long after Mark Twain recorded his intention of having his autobiography published posthumously, he succumbed to an attractive offer from George Harvey, the president of Harper and Brothers, to publish twenty-five installments, or “chapters,” in the North American Review, beginning in September 1906. With an eye toward pleasing readers, Harvey selected about 110,000 words of material to go into the magazine, omitting a few possibly controversial passages with the recommendations and approval of Mark Twain, who stipulated that none of his autobiography would be published in book form during his lifetime. The North American Review chapters were later reprinted in several book editions, including Mark Twain’s Own Autobiography (1990; rev. 2010), edited by Michael J. Kiskis. (The chapters also appear in the present volume.)

In 1924, Albert Bigelow Paine, Mark Twain’s biographer and literary executor and the first editor of the Mark Twain Papers, published about 250,000 words of Mark Twain’s autobiographical writings in two volumes as Mark Twain’s Autobiography. Despite Paine’s immense knowledge of Mark Twain and his intimate personal acquaintance with him, his edition is probably the least authoritative yet published. He tried to follow Mark Twain’s wish by arranging the material in the order in which it was created, but he included material that Mark Twain did not intend to be part of his formal autobiography, while omitting portions he himself regarded as uninteresting and rewording some passages without revealing what he had changed.

Bernard DeVoto, Paine’s successor as editor of the Mark