Mark Twain: A Biography and the "New" "Autobiography"

From a note I sent my wife:

As you may know, Mark Twain penned an "autobiography" during his lifetime but said it could not be published until 100 years after his death.

That Autobiography of Mark Twain is now starting to be published. Volume 1 (of three volumes?) is now available. I ordered it off Amazon.com -- apparently it has about 250 pages of introduction, before it even gets to his writing; and, then a hundred or so pages of notes and sources, so very little of his actual writing in the first volume.

Apparently his writing is very, very hard to follow, so it will be very, very interesting to see if I can follow it.

I have never "enjoyed" his books (the few snippets I must have read in high school) but I have always been curious how/why he did so well.

In anticipation of reading his "autobiography" which I think will be less autobiography and more personal ramblings, I picked up a biography of Mark Twain by Pulitzer-winning author Ron Powers. This looks to be an outstanding book. I have read the prologue and the writing is superb; it is not the usual "born in .... died in ..." type of biography. It seems written for a more sophisticated reader, though anyone can easily read it and appreciate it.

I think I told you how often the story of Boston is re-told in my readings: Henry James, Edmund Wilson, and now Mark Twain.

Attached is a copy of the first two pages that I typed -- notice two things:

• the points in Boston that you will recognize; and,
• finally how/why some of the prominent writers all had the same agent, the editor (actually his assistant, which I did not type that part) of the Atlantic Monthly. The list even included Harriet Beecher Stowe. Again, the influence/power that Harvard graduates had stands out.

You may not be able to download the attachment because I may not have the most recent Microsoft Word version on that computer.

In case the attachment does not get to you, I have also pasted all of it below:

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The first page and a half of Ron Powers biography of Mark Twain, c. 2005.

            On a chilly mid-November afternoon in 1869, a small man with a deranged mop of curly red hair and a wide-swept red mustache sauntered among the pedestrians in the 100 block of Tremont Street in Boston. He was desperately out of place amid these men in their muttonchops and tailored Scottish tweeds, and these women in their jeweled bonnets and brilliant brocade-lined shawls. Tremont bisected the epicenter of American cultural authority and power, announced by the Park Street Church across the thoroughfare and the sweep of the Boston Common behind it; the Georgian residential rooftops lining the far side of the Common; the wrought-iron balconies of Colonnade Row; the great domed neoclassical State House that commanded this elegant realm from the top of nearby Beacon Hill.

            It was not just his clothing, black and drably functional, that marked him as an interloper (he owned a smart white collar and swallowtails, but they were reserved for other purposes). It was his gait, a curious rocking, rolling shamble, conspicuously unurbane – the physical equivalent of a hinterland drawl, which he also possessed.

            None of this seemed to faze him. At 124 Tremont Street, a dignified little four-story town house recently converted to an office building, he pushed open the door and let himself inside. He stepped past the heavy tome-scented shelves that filled the commercial shop at street level, the bookstore of Ticknor & Fields, and climbed the staircase leading to the second floor.

            The stranger was – well, that depended. Born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in ”the almost invisible village of Florida, Monroe County, Missouri,” he had taken to calling himself “Mark Twain” as a newspaperman in Nevada and California, after experimenting with such other pen names as Rambler, W. Epaminondas Adrastus Blab, Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass, and Josh. Lately he had been called “The Wild Humorist of the Pacific Slope” and “The Moralist of the Main,” tags given him by his friend Charles Henry Webb.

            Ambiguous as he was, he was penetrating an enclave quite certain of its own place in the universe. Only Harvard College itself could have fetched him closer to the core of the young nation’s most important intellectual forces. Ticknor & Fields comprised not only a bookseller but a prestigious publishing house whose authors, many of whom lived nearby, commanded the first ranks of America’s emerging literature: the “Sage of Concord,” Ralph Waldo Emerson; the originator of the “Brahmin” aesthetic, Oliver Wendell Holmes; Nathaniel Hawthorne; Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Harriet Beecher Stowe; Henry David Thoreau.

            The visitor’s destination as an extension of this authoritative domain: the tiny editorial office of the Atlantic Monthly, a literary, cultural, and political magazine whose views, taste, and diction were supplied by the same New England literary aristocracy, and which was distributed to the nation (or at least to some thirty thousand of its citizens) as the highest cultural standard. The Atlantic had been founded twelve years earlier by a group of progressive-minded intellectuals, with the support of Emerson, Holmes, Longfellow, Stowe, and others. Harvard professor James Russell Lowell was appointed its first editor.