THE MARK TWAIN PAPERS

AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MARK TWAIN

VOLUME 1
The Mark Twain Project is an editorial and publishing program of The Bancroft
Library, working since 1967 to create a comprehensive critical edition of everything
Mark Twain wrote.
This volume is the first one in that edition to be published simultaneously in print
and as an electronic text at . The textual
commentaries for all Mark Twain texts in this volume are published only there.
THE MARK TWAIN PAPERS

Robert H. Hirst, General Editor
Board of Directors of the Mark Twain Project
Jo Ann Boydston
Laura Cerruti
Don L. Cook
Frederick Crews
Charles B. Faulhaber
Peter E. Hanff
Thomas C. Leonard
Michael Millgate
George A. Starr
G. Thomas Tanselle
Lynne Withey
Contributing Editors for This Volume
Natalia Cecire
Michelle Coleman
George Derk

Christine Hong
Rachel Perez
Leslie Walton

AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF
MARK
TWAIN

VOLUME 1

HARRIET ELINOR SMITH, EDITOR

Associate Editors
Benjamin Griffin
Victor Fischer
Michael B. Frank
Sharon K. Goetz
Leslie Diane Myrick

A publication of the Mark Twain Project
of The Bancroft Library


Frontispiece: Photograph by Albert Bigelow Paine, 25 June 1906, Upton House, Dublin, New Hampshire
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All texts by Mark Twain in Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1 have been published previously, by permission of
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the Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library, University of California Berkeley (Berkeley: The Bancroft Library, 2001), and
some texts have been published previously in one or more of the following: Albert Bigelow Paine, editor, Mark Twain’s
Autobiography (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1924); Bernard DeVoto, editor, Mark Twain in Eruption (New York: Harper
and Brothers, 1940); Charles Neider, editor, The Autobiography of Mark Twain, Including Chapters Now Published for the
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Twain, Mark, 1835–1910
[Autobiography]
Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1 / editor: Harriet Elinor Smith;
associate editors: Benjamin Griffin, Victor Fischer, Michael B. Frank, Sharon K. Goetz, Leslie Diane Myrick
p. cm. — (The Mark Twain Papers)
“A publication of the Mark Twain Project of The Bancroft Library.”
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-520-26719-0 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Twain, Mark, 1835–1910. 2. Authors, American—19th century—Biography. I. Smith, Harriet Elinor. II. Griffin,

Benjamin, 1968– III. Fischer, Victor, 1942– IV. Frank, Michael B. V. Goetz, Sharon K. VI. Myrick, Leslie Diane. VII.
Bancroft Library. VIII. Title.
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Editorial work for this volume has been supported by a generous gift to the Mark
Twain Project of The Bancroft Library from the
KORET FOUNDATION
and by matching and outright grants from the
NATIONAL ENDOWMENT
FOR THE HUMANITIES,
an independent federal agency.
Without that support, this volume could not
have been produced.
The Mark Twain Project at the University of California, Berkeley, gratefully
acknowledges generous support from the following, for editorial work on the
Autobiography of Mark Twain and for the acquisition of important new documents:
The University of California, Berkeley, Class of 1958
Members of the Mark Twain Luncheon Club
The Barkley Fund
The Mark Twain Foundation
The Beatrice Fox Auerbach Foundation Fund at the Hartford Foundation for
Public Giving
Lawrence E. Brooks
Helen Kennedy Cahill
Kimo Campbell

Virginia Robinson Furth
The Herrick Fund
The Hofmann Foundation
The House of Bernstein, Inc.
Robert and Beverly Middlekauff
The Renee B. Fisher Foundation
The Benjamin and Susan Shapell Foundation
Jeanne and Leonard Ware
Patricia Wright, in memory of Timothy J. Fitzgerald
and
The thousands of individual donors over the past fifty years
who have helped sustain the ongoing work
of the Mark Twain Project.

The publication of this volume has been made possible by a gift to
the University of California Press Foundation by
WILSON GARDNER COMBS
FRANK MARION GIFFORD COMBS
in honor of
WILSON GIFFORD COMBS
BA 1935, MA 1950, University of California, Berkeley
MARYANNA GARDNER COMBS
MSW 1951, University of California, Berkeley
University of California Press gratefully acknowledges the support of
John G. Davies
and the Humanities Endowment Fund of the UC Press Foundation
CONTENTS

List of Manuscripts and Dictations
Acknowledgments

Introduction
Preliminary Manuscripts and Dictations, 1870–1905
AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MARK TWAIN
Explanatory Notes
Appendixes
Samuel L. Clemens: A Brief Chronology
Family Biographies
Speech at the Seventieth Birthday Dinner, 5 December 1905
Speech at The Players, 3 January 1906
Previous Publication
Note on the Text
Word Division in This Volume
References
Index
Photographs
LIST OF MANUSCRIPTS
AND DICTATIONS

Preliminary Manuscripts and Dictations, 1870–1905
1870 [The Tennessee Land]
1877 [Early Years in Florida, Missouri]
1885 The Grant Dictations
The Chicago G.A.R. Festival
[A Call with W. D. Howells on General Grant]
Grant and the Chinese
Gerhardt
About General Grant’s Memoirs
[The Rev. Dr. Newman]
1890,
1893–94

The Machine Episode
1897 Travel-Scraps I
1898 Four Sketches about Vienna
[Beauties of the German Language]
[Comment on Tautology and Grammar]
[A Group of Servants]
[A Viennese Procession]
1898 My Debut as a Literary Person
1898–99 Horace Greeley
1898–99 Lecture-Times
1898–99 Ralph Keeler
1900 Scraps from My Autobiography. From Chapter IX
1900
Scraps from My Autobiography. Private History of a Manuscript
That Came to Grief
1903 [Reflections on a Letter and a Book]
1903 [Something about Doctors]
1904 [Henry H. Rogers]
1905 [Anecdote of Jean]

Except for the subtitle “Random Extracts from It” (which Clemens himself
enclosed in brackets), bracketed titles have been editorially supplied for works that
Clemens left untitled.



AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MARK TWAIN

1906 An Early Attempt
1897–98 My Autobiography [Random Extracts from It]

1906 The Latest Attempt
1906 The Final (and Right) Plan
1906 Preface. As from the Grave
1904 The Florentine Dictations
[John Hay]
Notes on “Innocents Abroad”
[Robert Louis Stevenson and Thomas Bailey Aldrich]
[Villa di Quarto]
1906 Autobiographical Dictations, January–March
9 January 7 February 8 March
10 January 8 February 9 March
11 January 9 February 12 March
12 January 12 February 14 March
13 January 13 February 15 March
15 January 14 February 16 March
16 January 15 February 20 March
17 January 16 February 21 March
18 January 20 February 22 March
19 January 21 February 23 March
23 January 22 February 26 March
24 January 23 February 27 March
1 February 26 February 28 March
2 February 5 March 29 March
5 February 6 March 30 March
6 February 7 March
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Intensive editorial work on the Autobiography of Mark Twain began some six years
ago and will continue for several more years. But the collective skills and expertise that
have allowed us to solve the daunting problems posed by this manuscript came gradually

into existence over four decades of editorial work on Mark Twain. We therefore thank the
National Endowment for the Humanities, an independent federal agency, both for its
three most recent outright and matching grants over the last six years, and for its patient,
generous, and uninterrupted support of the Mark Twain Project since 1966. At the same
time and with the same fervor, we thank the Koret Foundation for its recent generous
grant in support of editorial and production work on the Autobiography, all of which has
gone (or will go) to satisfy the matching component of the Endowment’s recent grants to
the Project.
For additional continuing support of work on the Autobiography and for help in
acquiring important original documents for the Mark Twain Papers, we thank those
institutions and individuals listed on page ix. The Mark Twain Project has been sustained
over the years in so many ways by so many people that we are obliged, with regret, to
thank them as one large group rather than by individual names. For donations to sustain
our work, ranging from five dollars to five million dollars, we here thank all our loyal and
generous supporters. Without their support, the Project would long ago have ceased to
exist, and would certainly not be completing work on the Autobiography at this time.
Recent efforts have been made to create an endowment to support the present and
future work of the Mark Twain Project, and we want to acknowledge those efforts here.
First and foremost we thank all the members of the University of California, Berkeley,
Class of 1958, led by Roger and Jeane Samuelsen, Edward H. Peterson, and Don and
Bitsy Kosovac, who recently created an endowment of $1 million dedicated to the Mark
Twain Project. We thank each and every member of the Class for their far-seeing wisdom
and generosity. To that endowment fund we may now add, with renewed gratitude,
contributions from the estate of Phyllis R. Bogue and the estate of Peter K. Oppenheim.
Instrumental in all recent fund-raising for the Project has been the Mark Twain
Luncheon Club, organized ten years ago by Ira Michael Heyman, Watson M. (Mac)
Laetsch, and Robert Middlekauff. Their leadership has been unflagging and indispensable,
and we thank them for it and for a thousand other forms of help. We also thank all of the
Club’s nearly one hundred members for their loyal financial and moral support of the
Project, and on their behalf we extend thanks to the several dozen speakers who have

agreed to address the Luncheon Club members over the years. Our thanks also go to
Dave Duer, director of development in the Berkeley University Library, for his continuing
wise and judicious counsel, and for his unprecedented efforts to raise financial support for
the Project. Last but not least we want to thank the Berkeley campus as a whole for
granting the Project relief from indirect costs on its several grants from the Endowment.
We are grateful for this and all other forms of support from our home institution.
We thank the staff of the University Library and The Bancroft Library at Berkeley,
especially Thomas C. Leonard, University Librarian; Charles Faulhaber, the James D. Hart
Director of The Bancroft Library; and Peter E. Hanff, its Deputy Director, all of whom
serve on the Board of Directors of the Mark Twain Project. To them and to the other
members of the Board—Jo Ann Boydston, Laura Cerruti, Don L. Cook, Frederick Crews,
Michael Millgate, George A. Starr, G. Thomas Tanselle, and Lynne Withey—we are
indebted for multiple forms of moral and intellectual support.
Scholars and archivists at other institutions have been vital to editorial work on this
volume. Barbara Schmidt, an independent scholar who maintains an invaluable website
(www.twainquotes.com) for Mark Twain research, tops our list when it comes to
information and documentation freely and generously volunteered. For this particular
volume she also provided us with photocopies of important original documents not
previously known to us. Kevin Mac Donnell, an expert dealer and collector of Mark Twain
documents, has as always been generous in sharing his extensive collection. Photographs
and other documentation were also provided by the following, to whom we express our
thanks: Lee Brumbaugh of the Nevada Historical Society, Reno; Christine Montgomery of
The State Historical Society of Missouri, Columbia; Patti Philippon of the Mark Twain
House and Museum, Hartford; and Henry Sweets of the Mark Twain Boyhood Home and
Museum, Hannibal. At our own university, we are grateful to Dan Johnston of the Digital
Imaging Laboratory for generating superb digital files from negatives of rare photographs.
We would also like to thank the following archivists who generously assisted us in our
research: Louise A. Merriam of the Andersen Library, University of Minnesota; Eva
Guggemos of the Beinecke Library at Yale University; and Kathleen Kienholz of the
American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York. Patricia Thayer Muno and James R.

Toncray contributed important information about their families.
We are grateful for the tireless help of Kathleen MacDougall, our highly skilled copy
editor and project manager at UC Press, who contributed much to the accuracy of the
editorial matter and was a guiding hand at every stage of the production process. We
thank Sandy Drooker, who designed the book and the dust jacket with her usual
consummate skill. As of old, we again thank Sam Rosenthal, who expertly supervised the
printing and binding process, and Laura Cerruti, our sponsoring editor, whose enthusiasm
and support for this edition were essential to its publication.
All volumes produced by the Mark Twain Project are the products of complex and
sustained collaboration. The student employees listed on page iii as Contributing Editors
carried out much of the preliminary work of transcribing, proofreading, and collating the
source documents that form the basis of the critical text. Associate editors Benjamin
Griffin, Victor Fischer, and Michael B. Frank contributed to every aspect of the editorial
work. They carried out original research for and drafted much of the annotation, and
helped with the painstaking preparation and checking required to produce accurate texts,
apparatus, and index. Associate editors Sharon K. Goetz and Leslie Diane Myrick brought
their unmatched technical expertise and innovative programming to bear on the
challenge of publishing this edition simultaneously in print and on Mark Twain Project
Online (www.marktwainproject.org). None of us would be able to edit as we do without
the Project’s administrative assistant, Neda Salem, who skillfully held the bureaucracy at
bay and patiently answered the myriad requests for information and copies of documents
which the Project receives from scholars and the general public.
We wish to express special gratitude to my colleague Lin Salamo, who retired from
the Project before this volume was completed. After more than two decades of dedicated
editorial work, she contributed to this edition what is arguably her most significant
professional accomplishment—reassembling and analyzing the hundreds of typescript
pages that make up the Autobiographical Dictations. Her research was the indispensable
key to our new understanding of Mark Twain’s plan for his autobiography.
H. E. S.
INTRODUCTION


Between 1870 and 1905 Mark Twain (Samuel L. Clemens) tried repeatedly, and at
long intervals, to write (or dictate) his autobiography, always shelving the manuscript
before he had made much progress. By 1905 he had accumulated some thirty or forty of
these false starts—manuscripts that were essentially experiments, drafts of episodes and
chapters; many of these have survived in the Mark Twain Papers and two other libraries.
To some of these manuscripts he went so far as to assign chapter numbers that placed
them early or late in a narrative which he never filled in, let alone completed. None dealt
with more than brief snatches of his life story.
He broke this pattern in January 1906 when he began almost daily dictations to a
stenographer. He soon decided that these Autobiographical Dictations would form the
bulk of what he would call the Autobiography of Mark Twain. Within a few months he
reviewed his accumulation of false starts and decided which to incorporate into the newer
dictation series and which to leave unpublished. By the time he had created more than
two hundred and fifty of these almost daily dictations (and written a final chapter in
December 1909, about the recent death of his daughter Jean), he had compiled more
than half a million words. He declared the work done, but insisted that it should not be
published in its entirety until a hundred years after his death, which occurred less than
four months later, on 21 April 1910.
This belated success with a project that had resisted completion for thirty-five years
can be traced to two new conditions. First, he had at last found a skilled stenographer
who was also a responsive audience—Josephine S. Hobby—which encouraged him to
embrace dictation as the method of composition, something he had experimented with as
early as 1885. Second, and just as important, dictating the text made it easier to follow a
style of composition he had been drifting toward for at least twenty years. As he put it in
June 1906, he had finally seen that the “right way to do an Autobiography” was to “start
it at no particular time of your life; wander at your free will all over your life; talk only
about the thing which interests you for the moment; drop it the moment its interest
threatens to pale, and turn your talk upon the new and more interesting thing that has
intruded itself into your mind meantime.”

1
Combining dictation and discursiveness in this bold way was unexpectedly liberating,
in large part because it produced not a conventional narrative marching inexorably
toward the grave, but rather a series of spontaneous recollections and comments on the
present as well as the past, arranged simply in the order of their creation. The problem of
method had been solved. It was also liberating to insist on posthumous publication, but
that idea had been around from the start and was closely tied to Clemens’s ambition to
tell the whole truth, without reservation. As he explained to an interviewer in 1899: “A
book that is not to be published for a century gives the writer a freedom which he could
secure in no other way. In these conditions you can draw a man without prejudice exactly
as you knew him and yet have no fear of hurting his feelings or those of his sons or
grandsons.” Posthumous publication was also supposed to make it easier for Clemens to
confess even shameful parts of his own story, but that goal proved illusory. In that same
1899 interview he admitted that a “man cannot tell the whole truth about himself, even if
convinced that what he wrote would never be seen by others.”
2
But if delaying publication failed to make him into a confessional autobiographer, it
did free him to express unconventional thoughts about religion, politics, and the damned
human race, without fear of ostracism. In January 1908 he recalled that he had long had
“the common habit, in private conversation with friends, of revealing every private
opinion I possessed relating to religion, politics, and men”—adding that he would “never
dream of printing one of them.”
3
The need to defer publication of subversive ideas
seemed obvious to him. “We suppress an unpopular opinion because we cannot afford
the bitter cost of putting it forth,” he wrote in 1905. “None of us likes to be hated, none of
us likes to be shunned.”
4
So having the freedom to speak his mind (if not confess his sins)
was still ample justification for delaying publication until after his death.

Seven months after he began the Autobiographical Dictations in 1906, however,
Clemens did permit—indeed actively pursued—partial publication of what he had so far
accumulated. He supervised the preparation of some twenty-five short extracts from his
autobiographical manuscripts and dictations for publication in the North American Review,
each selection deliberately tamed for that time and audience, and each prefaced by a
notice: “No part of the autobiography will be published in book form during the lifetime of
the author.”
5
But not long after Clemens died, his instruction to delay publication for a
hundred years began to be ignored—first in 1924 by Albert Bigelow Paine, Mark Twain’s
official biographer and first literary executor, then in 1940 by Paine’s successor, Bernard
DeVoto, and most recently by Charles Neider in 1959.
Each of these editors undertook to publish only a part of the text, and none ventured
to do so in the way that Clemens actually wanted it published. Paine began his two-
volume edition with all but a handful of the manuscripts and dictations carried out before
1906, as well as several texts that were probably never part of those early experiments.
He arranged all of them “in accordance with the author’s wish . . . in the order in which
they were written, regardless of the chronology of events.”
6
It now seems clear that
Paine’s understanding of “the author’s wish” was mistaken: Clemens never intended to
include all those false starts, let alone in chronological order; he intended only the
dictations begun in 1906 to be published that way. But having chosen this course, Paine
then had space for only a relative handful of the dictations. And on top of that, he felt
obliged to suppress or even alter certain passages without notice to the reader. He
eventually acknowledged that he had published only about one-third of what he regarded
as the whole text.
7
DeVoto was critical of Paine’s acceptance of “the arrangement Mark Twain originally
gave” the dictations, “interspersed as they were with trivialities, irrelevancies, newspaper

clippings, and unimportant letters—disconnected and without plan.” Instead he chose to
print only passages that Paine had left unpublished, drawn from “the typescript in which
everything that Mark wanted in his memoirs had been brought together” (that is, the
Autobiographical Dictations begun in 1906). DeVoto then arranged the selections by
topic, “omitting trivialities and joining together things that belonged together.” And he
said with great satisfaction that he had “modernized the punctuation by deleting
thousands of commas and dashes, and probably should have deleted hundreds more.” He
was confident that he had “given the book a more coherent plan than Mark Twain’s” and
he was unapologetic about having “left out” what seemed to him “uninteresting.”
8
Neider, too, was unhappy with Paine’s acceptance of Mark Twain’s plan to publish the
autobiography “not in chronological order but in the sequence in which it was written and
dictated. What an extraordinary idea! As though the stream of composition time were in
some mysterious way more revealing than that of autobiographical time!”
9
Neider had
permission from the Mark Twain Estate to combine some thirty thousand words from the
unpublished dictations with what Paine and DeVoto had already published. Like DeVoto,
he omitted what he disliked, and was also obliged to exclude portions that Clara Clemens
Samossoud (Clemens’s daughter, by then in her eighties) disapproved of publishing. He
then (figuratively) cut apart and rearranged the texts he had selected so that they
approximated a conventional, chronological narrative—exactly the kind of autobiography
Mark Twain had rejected.
The result of these several editorial plans has been that no text of the Autobiography
so far published is even remotely complete, much less completely authorial. It is
therefore the goal of the present edition to publish the complete text as nearly as
possible in the way Mark Twain intended it to be published after his death. That goal has
only recently become attainable, for the simple reason that no one knew which parts of
the great mass of autobiographical manuscripts and typescripts Mark Twain intended to
include. In fact, the assumption had long prevailed that Mark Twain did not decide what

to put in and what to leave out—that he left the enormous and very complicated
manuscript incomplete and unfinished.
That assumption was wrong. Although Mark Twain left no specific instructions (not
even documentation for the instructions that Paine professed to follow), hidden within the
approximately ten file feet of autobiographical documents are more than enough clues to
show that he had in fact decided on the final form of the Autobiography, and which of the
preliminary experiments were to be included and which omitted. This newly discovered
and unexpected insight into his intentions is itself a story worth telling, and it is told for
the first time in this introduction.
Three printed volumes are planned for this edition, which will also be published in full
at Mark Twain Project Online (MTPO). Exhaustive documentation of all textual decisions
will only be published online.
10
This first volume begins with the extant manuscripts and
dictations that must now be regarded as Clemens’s preliminary efforts to write the
autobiography and that he reviewed and rejected (but did not destroy) in June 1906.
They are arranged arbitrarily in the order of their date of composition, solely because
Clemens himself never specified any order. Some of these texts he explicitly labeled
“autobiography,” and some are judged to be part of his early experiments on other
grounds, always explained in the brief headnotes that introduce them. We include those
preliminary texts for which the evidence is reasonably strong, without asserting that there
were no others.
The Autobiography of Mark Twain proper begins on p. 201 in this volume, starting
with the several prefaces Clemens created in June 1906 to frame the early manuscripts
and dictations he had selected as opening texts, followed by his almost daily
Autobiographical Dictations from 9 January through the end of March 1906—all that will
fit into this volume. The dictations are arranged in the chronological order of their
creation because that is how Clemens instructed his editors to publish them. 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 &
unconscious of 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. Fields and her
husband were visiting the Clemenses in Hartford. She recorded in her diary that at lunch,
on 28 April 1876, Clemens
proceeded to speak of his Autobiography which he intends to write as fully and
sincerely as possible to leave behind him—His wife laughingly said, she should look it
over and leave out objectionable passages—No, he said very earnestly almost
sternly, you are not to edit it—it is to appear as it is written with the whole tale told
as truly as I can tell it—I shall take out passages from it and publish as I go along, in
the Atlantic and elsewhere, but I shall not limit myself as to space and at whatever
ever age I am writing about even if I am an infant and an idea comes to me about
myself when I am forty I shall put that in. Every man feels that his experience is
unlike that of anybody else and therefore he should write it down—he finds also that
everybody else has thought and felt on some points precisely as he has done, and
therefore he should write it down.

18
This remarkable statement shows that Clemens was already committed to several
ideas that would govern the autobiography he worked on over the next thirty-five years.
The notion is already present that publication must be posthumous, a requirement linked
to the ambition to have “the whole tale told as truly as I can tell it,” without censoring
himself or allowing others to do it for him. He also plans to publish selections from the
narrative while still alive, withholding the rest “to leave behind him.” He will not limit
himself “as to space,” but will be as digressive and discursive as he likes, even ignoring
chronology when it suits him. These cardinal points are clearly interrelated: absolute
truth telling would be made easier by knowing that his own death would precede
publication, and discursiveness (quite apart from his natural preference for it) would help
to disarm his own impulse toward self-censorship. But it would take another thirty years
to actually apply these various ideas to a real autobiography.
Just a year or so later, sometime in 1877, Clemens seems actually to have begun
writing, prompted (as he recalled in 1904) by a conversation with his good friend John
Milton Hay. Hay “asked if I had begun to write my autobiography, and I said I hadn’t. He
said that I ought to begin at once” (since the time to begin was at age forty, and
Clemens was already forty-two).
I had lost two years, but I resolved to make up that loss. I resolved to begin my
autobiography at once. I did begin it, but the resolve melted away and disappeared
in a week and I threw my beginning away. Since then, about every three or four
years I have made other beginnings and thrown them away. Once I tried the
experiment of a diary, intending to inflate that into an autobiography when its
accumulation should furnish enough material, but that experiment lasted only a
week; it took me half of every night to set down the history of the day, and at the
week’s end I did not like the result.
19
In late November 1877 Clemens listed “My Autobiography” among other projects in his
notebook, reminding himself to “Publish scraps from my Autobiography occasionally.” He
did indeed write an eleven-page manuscript at this time which he intended as the first

chapter of an autobiography—very likely the “beginning” that in 1904 he remembered
having thrown away. He titled it merely “Chapter 1,” but it is commonly known as “Early
Years in Florida, Missouri,” the title Paine assigned it.
20
It begins, “I was born the 30th of
November, 1835”—the same way Clemens began his Aldine burlesque in 1871—and it
goes on to reminisce briefly about his early memories of childhood in that “almost
invisible village of Florida, Monroe county, Missouri.” Like “The Tennessee Land” (the only
extant autobiographical fragment that was written earlier, in 1870) it ends somewhat
abruptly, exactly as if the author’s interest had “melted away and disappeared.”
If Clemens did, as he says, make successive attempts to write the autobiography
“every three or four years” after 1877, few are known to survive.
21
What we have instead
are such things as his advice in 1880 to Orion about his autobiography: “Keep in mind
what I told you—when you recollect something which belonged in an earlier chapter, do