Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1: The Complete and Authoritative Edition Volume 10 Hardcover - 2010

From the rear cover

"Mark Twain dictated much of this book--now it is a book at last--from a big rumpled bed. Reading it is a bit like climbing in there with him."--Roy Blount, Jr.

"To say that the editors have done an extremely good job is a little like saying the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel does a good job of keeping the rain off the Pope's head. It is true but it doesn't give even a whiff of the grandeur of the thing."--Robert D. Richardson, author of Emerson: The Mind on Fire

"Mark Twain, always so blithely ahead of his time, has just outdone himself: he's brought us an Autobiography from beyond the grave: a hundred-year-old relic that yet manages to accomplish something new. It anticipates the Cubism just taking form in Samuel Clemens's last years, by exploding the confines of orderliness, sequence, the dutiful march of this-then-that. In so doing, it gives us not simply Mark Twain's life--that is the prosaic work of biographers--but the ways in which he thought of his life: in all the fragmented recollection, distraction, creation, revision and dreaming that make up the true, divinely jumbled devices we all use to recapture experience and feeling. If this prodigious and prodigal pastiche were a machine, it would be the Paige typesetter--except that it works."--Ron Powers, author of Mark Twain: A Life

Media reviews

Citations

• Booklist, 09/15/2010, Page 16
• Books & Culture, 05/01/2011, Page 16
• Choice, 06/01/2011, Page 0
• Christian Century, 05/31/2011, Page 32
• Entertainment Weekly, 12/24/2010, Page 118
• Library Journal, 09/15/2010, Page 74
• Library Journal Prepub Alert, 07/01/2010, Page 57
• New York Review of Books, 02/24/2011, Page 19
• New York Times Book Review, 12/19/2010, Page 1
• New Yorker (The), 11/29/2010, Page 78
• People Weekly, 12/27/2010, Page 65
• Publishers Weekly, 09/27/2010, Page 0
• Publishers Weekly Best Books, 11/08/2010, Page 29