The Autobiography of Mark Twain

In his autobiography Mark Twain 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 his 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."