November 15 is the publication date of a book that has been been in the can for 100 years. I’m referring to the first volume of the “Autobiography of Mark Twain”. There’s so much buzz about this book that it’s already high on the best-seller lists of both Amazon and Barnes & Noble. This has to qualify as the greatest marketing campaign in the history of book publishing.
Twain dictated the book to a stenographer in the six years before he died in 1910 and then promptly instructed his literary heirs to put it away for 100 years.
Why the long wait? Twain apparently wanted to speak the truth in his autobiography but he thought his uncensored opinions about people he’d known might offend some of them, and he didn’t want the book to be published while they were living -- or even during the lives of their children.
All I can say is, I can’t wait to read this book. If Mark Twain thought his views were too hot to publish till 100 years later, this should be one entertaining book. Because this is a man who wasn’t afraid of expressing his opinion and writing controversially. As one example, here is his opinion of Jane Austen:
"Every time I read 'Pride and Prejudice,' I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone."
Early in his career Mark Twain was a journalist in Virginia City Nevada, in the Wild West, in an era when newspapermen would as soon print tall tales as facts, and when duels were still being fought over the opinions expressed in newspaper articles.
This was a man who wasn’t afraid of controversy. His most famous book, “Huckleberry Finn”, was published 125 years ago, but it’s still capable of stirring up passions, and there are still people who want to ban it from schools and libraries because they think its language is too raw and offensive. He wasn’t afraid to speak out against racism and imperialism in the United States, at a time when those weren’t popular opinions.
Unfortunately, Mark Twain wouldn’t last a week as an author in today’s politically correct world. He’d have people threatening to sue him for libel, editors would refuse to publish him, his speaking engagements would dry up, and he’d have to go on “Oprah” and tearfully apologize if he wanted to have any semblance of a career.
He was not a bland writer. He had personality. He wrote with passion, vitriol, and joy. Towards the end of his life he got a little bitter, because of personal tragedies that started to pile up (the deaths of his wife and three of his four children). There was more bite to his humor than there had been in the past. The one thing about Twain, though: his writing was never neutral, or lukewarm. When you read a page of Mark Twain, you know you’re going to be entertained, maybe angered, but never bored.
And that’s why I can’t wait till his autobiography comes out. If someone who wrote like that his whole life decided his final summing up was too controversial to publish till 100 years after he died, well, it must be a pretty outrageous book.
I’ll take outrageous over lukewarm any day, even if it’s 100 years overdue.
