The creator of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn and some of the most frequently misquoted catchphrases in the English language left behind 5,000 unedited pages of memoirs when he died in 1910, together with handwritten notes saying that he did not want them to hit bookshops for at least a century.

That milestone has now been reached, and in November the University of California, Berkeley, where the manuscript is in a vault, will release the first volume of Mark Twain's autobiography. The eventual trilogy will run to half a million words, and shed new light on the quintessentially American novelist...

"He had doubts about God, and in the autobiography, he questions the imperial mission of the US in Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. He's also critical of [Theodore] Roosevelt, and takes the view that patriotism was the last refuge of the scoundrel. Twain also disliked sending Christian missionaries to Africa. He said they had enough business to be getting on with at home: with lynching going on in the South, he thought they should try to convert the heathens down there."

In other sections of the autobiography, Twain makes cruel observations about his supposed friends, acquaintances and one of his landladies.


zowie!

You've only pasted your choice of reviews. I'll read every word they publish of Twain's but it won't change my life. He is just one person and one writer. There are a half dozen posters on xpt that can write in the "American Voice" of Twain and that doesn't mean you have to march over a cliff in support of their opinions.

I love him, and I get him, but he is just a guy trying to outfox you with words. He was definitely best when he was dealing with interpersonal relationships between God and Man and conversely slave and master but again- just one guys opinion. Same as Tom Robbins or Hemingway or Conroy.

yeah that whole slavery thing huh

What?

You will never understand him no matter how hard you try. You will read and quote one of his diatribes and yet, sadly, you will never understand the relationship between Huck and Jim. Never.

You can't speak for Michelle Obama until you fucked a Chicago nigger, and you certainly can't speak for Mark Twain.

I have no idea what the fuck Bornyo is rambling on about, sounds drunk and weepy again, but Huck Finn is a great novel.

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you certainly can't speak for Mark Twain.

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not trying to pally....that is the cool thing about the autobiography...he gets to speak for himself!

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If only I could get past the annoying southern writing style in Twain's most popular works of fiction, but I can't.

Are any of his lesser-known works of fiction particularly good?

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You will never understand him no matter how hard you try.!!!!!

The Mysterious Stranger is short and not written in dialect. Of course it depends on which version you read.

Thanks for the recommendations; that helps to narrow things down. If I like those enough, perhaps I'll manage to tolerate the writing style in the Huck Finn stories.

To clarify what I wrote about "Stranger"... none are in dialect- in fact they take place in Austria, but Twain wrote several versions, and never blessed any of them. Then died before publication. So there is an early version then a later version released second hand. The latter supposedly better researched and closer to his goal.

It displays his scorn for organized religion and Christianity...you know, all those subjects the cognizati around XPT deal in.

I'll check it out later if I can pull myself away from gaming long enough.

As for religion, I'm an atheist, believe it or not. But I don't have a problem with the followers of any religion unless they're doing something that I think they shouldn't do.