The Autobiography of Mark Twain by mark twain

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

I don’t know if my brain has been destroyed from tech and modern life, but I didn’t have any patience for this book. Rambling, no connecting threads other than his observations, and older English that made it even more convoluted and hard for me to follow. I quit at chapter 6.

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Rusafa

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

I enjoyed this so much. It is a completely unconventional bio, and the introduction is extremely interesting and helpful in understanding the book's structure: it doesn't have one. As Twain remembered things, he wrote them. They were to be published in the order of composition. I like this. It helps it read more like a journal. There were some really tragic accounts. I think saddest of all are the accounts of the deaths of his children - most especially his infant. His daughters seem to be remarkable people - all of them. The accounts of the vast mounts of money he made and lost and his extensive travel make for a fascinating read in and of themselves. Add to that Twain's trademark tongue-in-cheek humor, and it is a whole lot of fun. I would love to go back and read this after becoming intimately familiar with all his work, because he tells about people upon whom many of his characters were based, and I thought that a lot of fun. Kind of like meeting the characters in real life. I wouldn't call this profound necessarily, but it is certainly very enjoyable and there are many nuggets scattered about it. Great stuff!

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burntToastShshs

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

دائما ما أسمع العبارات الساخرة لمارك توين
ولكني كالكثيرين لم أكن أعلم من هو، حتى وجدت هذه السيرة بين ادراج المكتبة.
صمويل لانغهورن والمعروف ب"مارك توين" كاتب إمريكي ساخر، ستتعرف بين هذه الصفحات عن رحلة حياته وحبه الكبير لعائلته.

"ما أسهل أن تجعل الناس يصدقون كذبة ما، ولكن كم هو صعب في المقابل أن تعود لتقنعهم بأنها لم تكن سوى كذبة"

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bossunhimeswitch

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

This is NOT the Mark Twain Post 100 years Autobiography that everyone is talking about. This book was copyrighted in 1959 by the editor Charles Neider. The 2010 Autobiography of Mark Twain. Vol. 1 is found elsewhere on GRs.

Neider's most important book, however, was arguably The Autobiography of Mark Twain (1959), in which he fashioned a chronological structure that was lacking in the original material and included never-before-published passages. Certainly the most widely read version of Mark Twain's autobiographical writings, that book has played a major role in shaping the public image of Mark Twain the man. Source: http://faculty.citadel.edu/leonard/js...

This 1959 version is hardly an autobiography in the born-lived-died sense. In fact, it took me about 50 pages before I figured out that I was going to be disappointed if I continued to look for that kind of an autobiography. This book is really a series of short stories told as if a Mark Twain impersonator was standing up in front of you on stage. With Mark Twain it is always hard to figure out when he is telling the truth. His name is even fiction. His speaking style is often as if he is telling a story. Twain tells stories about his years on the lecture circuit traveling the U.S. and the world telling stories. He is known as an amazing storyteller.

If this was a book of short stories and that was what I was looking for, I would probably give this book three stars. But I was looking for something a little more like an autobiography. I though that it developed more of a coherent whole feeling toward the end. More like one big connected story rather than a random selection of short stories. I am wondering how the new 2010 autobiography will handle my quest to read something about the life and times of Mark Twain; maybe it will have to be a biography. Please let it not be Wikipedia!

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koko6

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

I enjoyed for a while, but I began to find it rather long and tedious. It does require an in-depth knowledge of his works and all of the characters.

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Xavirne

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

I was born and raised in England so to me, Mark Twain is not the icon that American readers appreciate. I suppose I read 'Huckleberry Finn' as a teenager, but nothing else of his. This is an unusual autobiography in that it does not begin at birth continuing in a linear fashion as most biographies do. Rather it is a series of vignettes in no particular order, but rather dictated as his whims directed. I have to say that, having read this, I find I dislike the man. For one thing, he soundly criticizes Andrew Carnegie for being a name-dropper and an egotist and talking too much about famous people he knows. I have to use the phrase 'pot calling the kettle black' here as Clemens is constantly doing the same thing in his memoirs. Secondly, I find the fact that he is so fond of young girls that he regularly 'borrows' them from their mothers for them to accompany him on visits to famous people or just to have around the house. I can't help but think of shades of 'Lolita' here. I admit that I am viewing this in the context of 2021 and the 'Me Too' movement but even so, I do find it a bit creepy. If you want to know more about Samuel Clemens, then this is a good book to read, but for myself, I am not a fan.

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Lostfiniel

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

A nice, leisurely stroll through selected incidents in the eventful life of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, as told by Mark Twain. He used the freedom of speaking "from beyond the grave" to allow an unrestrained view of people and events that he recalled, but aside from Bret Harte and several of his earliest publishers, he takes a fairly charitable view of the follies and foibles of his fellow men and women. And I'm inclined to think that he might well have invented Captain Haddock, from the Tin Tin comics, in the person of a mate on a riverboat:
"He read, and he read great deal, and diligently, but his whole library consisted of of a single book. It was Lyell's Geology, and he had stuck to it until all its grim and rugged scientific terminology was familiar in his mouth, though he hadn't the least idea what the words meant, and didn't care what they meant. All he wanted out of those great words was the energy they stirred up in his roustabouts. In times of extreme emergency he would let fly a volcanic irruption of the old regular orthodox profanity mixed up and seasoned all through with imposing geological terms, then formally charge his roustabouts with being Old Silurian Invertebrates out of the Incandescent Anisodactylous Post-Pliocene Period, and damn the whole gang in a body to perdition"

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