Twain Tales

How did a university, a press and a library create a bestseller, anyway? That bestseller being the much talked about autobiography of Mark Twain?

From a piece in the Chronicle for Higher Education...

The editor was in town to talk about the process of getting the Autobiography into the hands of Twain's still-adoring public—and to emphasize the role public money, in the form of financial support from the humanities endowment, helped play in making it happen. In a lecture chock-full of colorful Twain anecdotes—always a crowd-pleaser—Mr. Hirst described how Twain Project editors and graduate students spent the last five years sifting through and collating 5,000 pages of manuscript and trying to figure out how to organize it as Twain wanted.

A lot of that work involved discarding the less-than-tender ministrations of earlier editors. The Autobiography has never been published in full before—Twain wanted to make sure everybody mentioned in it would be long dead before it saw print—but sections of it have appeared over the years. According to Mr. Hirst, previous editors felt free to cross out, change, and censor some of what Twain wrote. The current editorial team, led by Harriet Elinor Smith and overseen by Mr. Hirst, had to sort out Twain's handwriting from that of various editors—sometimes four or five different sets of markings on a single page. "It's very hard to say that anyone's deletion of a comma is distinctive," Mr. Hirst told the audience.