100 years later, Twain finally speaks

It's amazing that only now is this great man's autobiography published - but that's just what he demanded:

Exactly a century after rumours of his death turned out to be entirely accurate, one of Mark Twain's dying wishes is at last coming true: an extensive, outspoken and revelatory autobiography which he devoted the last decade of his life to writing is finally going to be published.

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.

Can't wait to read it. It's said to be 400 pages of bile, but Twain's bile is still worth bottling:

This was another unrealised dream of riches for Twain, the worst of which concerned his investment, "over more than one fifth of my life", and loss of hundreds of thousands of dollars in James Paige's never-completed development of an automatic typesetting machine. The editors calmly refer to Twain's "unsparing account of his own beguilement". Twain was also unsparing of Paige. Although they always met on "effusively affectionate terms", Twain believed that Paige knew that "if I had his nuts in a steel trap, I would shut out all human succour and watch that trap till he died".

How badly the publishers understood the market:

Apparently, the University of California Press was a little uncertain of the potential, and only planned for a measly 7,500 copies. But in the short time since its release, the late Twain is on best-seller lists, and The New York Times reports that the university press is now thinking that 275,000 isn't enough.

But if Twain banned publication, he didn't say anything about audio recordings. Click the video above to hear some extracts. Background to the publication below: