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Mark Twain’s Own Autobiography
The Chapters from the North American Review
Second Edition
Mark Twain
Edited by Michael J. Kiskis
Foreword by Sheila Leary
Wisconsin Studies in Autobiography
William L. Andrews, Series Editor
“Now, then, that is the tale. Some of it is true.”
—Mark Twain
Mark Twain’s Own Autobiography stands as the last of Twain’s great yarns. Here he tells his story in his own way, freely expressing his joys and sorrows, his affections and hatreds, his rages and reverence—ending, as always, tongue-in-cheek: “Now, then, that is the tale. Some of it is true.”
More than the story of a literary career, this memoir is anchored in the writer’s relation to his family—what they meant to him as a husband, father, and artist. It also brims with many of Twain’s best comic anecdotes about his rambunctious boyhood in Hannibal, his misadventures in the Nevada territory, his notorious Whittier birthday speech, his travels abroad, and more.
Twain published twenty-five “Chapters from My Autobiography”
in the North American Review in 1906 and 1907. “I intend that this
autobiography . . . shall be read and admired a good many centuries because of its form and method—form and method whereby the past and the present are constantly brought face to face, resulting in contrasts which newly fire up the interest all along, like contact of flint with steel.”
For this second edition, Michael Kiskis’s introduction references a wealth of critical work done on Twain since 1990. He also adds a discussion of literary domesticity, locating the autobiography within the history of Twain’s literary work and within Twain’s own understanding and experience of domestic concerns.
Michael J. Kiskis (d. 2011) was the Leonard Tydings Grant Professor of American Literature at Elmira College. He was also the co-editor of Constructing Mark Twain: New Directions in Scholarship.
• The Mark Twain House and Museum, Hartford, CT www.marktwainhouse.org
• The Center for Mark Twain Studies, Elmira College, Elmira, NY elmira.edu/academics/distinctive_programs/twain
_center
• The Mark Twain Boyhood Home & Museum, Hannibal, MO www.marktwainmuseum.org
• The Mark Twain Papers & Project, University of California, Berkeley
http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/MTP
Media & bookseller inquiries regarding review copies, events, and interviews can be directed to the publicity department at publicity@uwpress.wisc.edu or (608) 263-0734. (If you want to examine a book for possible course use, please see our Course Books page. If you want to examine a book for possible rights licensing, please see Rights & Permissions.)
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February 2010
LC: 2009010516 PS
392 pp. 6 x 9
• Over 10,000 copies of the first edition sold
“Distinctly Mark Twain.”
—Publishers Weekly
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