Autobiography of Mark Twain: Volume 1 edited by Harriet Elinor Smith, et al.

(Univ. of Calif., 736 pages, $35)

If Mark Twain is watching from the afterlife, he must be “cackling with glee,” said Laura Skandera Trombley in The Boston Globe. His autobiography—a sprawling, 5,000-page stream-of-consciousness work that he dictated primarily over the last three and a half years of his life—is actually getting the 21st-century rollout that he requested. Worried that his revelations might be too scandalous, he asked that the project not be released until he was 100 years gone. Though substantial excerpts have leaked out before, the appearance of this first book in a planned three-volume set distinguishes Twain as perhaps “the first author in history to plan and actualize a new publication a century after his death.”

Last acts don’t get much better than this, said Michael Shelden in the San Francisco Chronicle. Indulging in his ability to “speak from beyond the grave,” Twain fires away at the big targets of his day, from John D. Rockefeller to Theodore Roosevelt. His ability to attack with humor is unrivaled, as when he calls a publishing enemy a “skinny, yellow, toothless, bald-headed, rat-eyed professional liar and a scoundrel.” Such attacks were, in his opinion, entirely deserved. “When I build a fire under a person, I do not do it merely because of the enjoyment I get out of seeing him fry,” he said, “but because he is worth the trouble.”

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Twain seemed to draw a line on candor when it came to himself, said Edmund Morris in The Wall Street Journal. “You cannot lay bare your private soul and look at it,” he once told a reporter. “It is too disgusting.” Though the great raconteur “talks enchantingly about his barefoot boyhood in Missouri, his apprentice days as a printer’s brat and a cub reporter, and his years piloting on the Mississippi,” he provides so little of a confessional nature that it’s sometimes mysterious why he insisted on posthumous publication. Once in a while, the old man just rambles. But “on the whole, this volume is hard to stop reading.” At the beginning of the 21st century, Twain still beguiles.