Mark Twain Autobiography review

Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 1 by Mark Twain

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is a really unusual autobiography. It doesn't start with the author's birth and tell the story of his life in sequence as you would expect. Instead, Twain just writes about whatever subject interests him at the moment. He inserts articles from the newspaper and comments on them in addition to writing about incidents from his life.

There are parts of the book he did not want published until 100 years after his death. That was the thing that got me interested in reading it.

Strangely enough, the motivation for this book was the copyright laws in force at the time. Today we have laws that keep copyright in force until 75 years after an author's death. Back then it was based on the date of publication, and books frequently went out of copyright while the author was still alive. After that, anyone could publish the book without paying the author.

Twain's scheme was to publish new editions of all of his books with extra autobiographical material at the end. If you bought his books from his publishing house you'd get this bonus material, but if you bought public domain editions you would not. At the end of the third volume he announces that the copyright laws have been changed, making this scheme unnecessary, and he quits it at that point.

I have read all three volumes and found it to be one of the most entertaining books I've ever read. If you're only going to read one of Twain's books, it should not be this one (I'd recommend The Innocents Abroad) but if you love Twain this book will increase that love.

This particular edition has a lot of endnotes not written by Twain that take up almost a third of each volume. You can get a "reader's edition" with this removed, and you might want to do that.



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