Mark Twain created Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer and many misquoted catch-phrases in English. He left 5,000 unedited pages of memoirs after he died in 1910.
He, also, left a hand-written scribbling, note, saying that they weren’t to be sold in book stores, book-shops, for at least a century.
The century is here. The University of California, Berkeley, is where the manuscript is living, in a vault.
At first, a volume of Mark Twain’s autobiography will be released, and then the trilogy will follow.
The following sheds some on light on what’s in the memoir.
Twain had a scandalous relationship with Isabel Van Kleek Lyon, and she became his secretary after his wife’s death in 1904. Lyon purchased a sex toy for Twain, but Twain fired her in 1909, after he said she hypnotized him into giving her power of attorney.
“There are so many biographies of Twain, and many of them have used bits and pieces of the autobiography,” Robert Hirst, who is leading the team at Berkeley editing the complete text.