What Can We Expect in the Next Volume of Mark Twain's Autobiography?

That's the question recently posed by the Los Angeles Times.

From the article...

Thrust into a publishing success about which other academics can only fantasize, Smith and her colleagues at UC Berkeley's Mark Twain Papers & Project have become celebrities in the rarefied world of literary research and editing.

But like rock stars with a first hit record, they are coping now with hugely elevated expectations for the autobiography's next two volumes, which will bring the much-loved author's complete dictated memoir to print for the first time. And they worry about all the work ahead if they are to meet deadlines of 2012 and 2014.

"It's very strange and it's quite uncomfortable at times," Smith said of the shift from a scholarly but small audience for the Twain center's previous books to the runaway success now.

The first volume of the planned trilogy has remained a national bestseller since its release in November, 100 years after Twain's death at the age of 74. There are nearly half a million copies in print, putting it as high as No. 4 on the Los Angeles Times' hardback nonfiction list and No. 2 on the New York Times' list.

"It's not often that you get these events where the scholarly world and the popular sphere collide," Benjamin Griffin, one of the memoir's associate editors, said recently. He spoke in the small office he and Smith share in UC Berkeley's Bancroft Library, near the repository of the world's largest collection of Twain manuscripts and letters. Most of the 20,000 items came to the university in 1949 with permission of Twain's daughter Clara, who later donated them.