Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 1: The Complete and Authoritative Edition, Volume 1
About this audiobook
“I’ve struck it!” Mark Twain wrote in a 1904 letter to a friend. “And I will give it away—to you. You will never know how much enjoyment you have lost until you get to dictating your autobiography.”
Thus, after dozens of false starts and hundreds of pages, Twain embarked on his “Final (and Right) Plan” for telling the story of his life. His innovative notion—to “talk only about the thing which interests you for the moment”—meant that his thoughts could range freely. The strict instruction that many of these texts remain unpublished for one hundred years meant that when they came out, he would be “dead, and unaware, and indifferent,” and that he was therefore free to speak his “whole frank mind.”
The year 2010 marked the one hundredth anniversary of Twain’s death. In celebration of this important milestone, here, for the first time, is Mark Twain’s uncensored autobiography, in its entirety, exactly as he left it. This major literary event offers the first of three volumes and presents Mark Twain’s authentic and unsuppressed voice, brimming with humor, ideas, and opinions, and speaking clearly from the grave, as he intended.
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About the author
Mark Twain (1835–1910) was born Samuel L. Clemens in the town of Florida, Missouri. He is one of the most popular and influential authors our nation has ever produced, and his keen wit and incisive satire earned him praise from both critics and peers. He has been called not only the greatest humorist of his age but also the father of American literature.
Harriet Smith is one of the editors at the Mark Twain Papers and Project at the Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley.
Michael Frank was a Los Angeles Times book critic for nearly ten years, and his short stories and essays have been widely anthologized. His fiction has been presented at Symphony Space’s Selected Shorts: A Celebration of the Short Story, and his travel writing has been collected in Italy: The Best Travel Writing from The New York Times. He lives in New York City and Liguria, Italy.
Grover Gardner is an award-winning narrator with over a thousand titles to his credit. Named one of the “Best Voices of the Century” and a Golden Voice by AudioFile magazine, he has won three prestigious Audie Awards, was chosen Narrator of the Year for 2005 by Publishers Weekly, and has earned more than thirty Earphones Awards.
