I’m going to go straight to the index and look up the Mercantile Library when the first volume of this trilogy comes out in November. According to this article in The Independent, we can expect it to be quite juicy. Parts of the autobiography have been used for the many biographies of Twain but according to Robert Hirst, leading the team editing the complete text, more than half of the text has been seen only by those able to travel to Berkeley to view the manuscript. Why mandate that your final autobiographical manuscript have a publication date delayed 100 years after you’re dead? My guess is not to embarrass any of the persons, families, or political and religious entities ranted against therein. Of course November is a long way off. In the meantime, there are always those letters available at the Public Library’s Virtual Library, or a cache of Twainiana here, at the Mark Twain Project.
And here’s the University of California Press blog on the subject: Mark Twain after 100 Years
-Ed Scripsi
