Censorship as / and Social Good
Background and Introduction
Mark Twain worked on an
autobiography off and on for a substantial portion of his career . Twain scholars have identified pieces of writing intended for the text beginning as early as 1870 ( Twain , 2010a ). All of these early drafts were set aside for one reason or another , but late in life the autobiography received a great deal of his attention . “ You will never know how much enjoyment you have lost until you get to dictating your autobiography ; then you will realize , with a pang , that you might have been doing it all your life if you had only had the luck to think of it ,” Twain wrote to his friend and editor William Dean Howells on January 16 , 1904 ( Smith , 2010a ).
Twain ’ s interest in dictation came after years of failing to write an autobiography that met his expectations ; and , even dictation was not immediately compelling . He experimented with the approach in small doses for several more years before launching into an extensive effort to dictate the text . For a period of three years beginning in January 1906 , he met nearly every day with stenographer Josephine Hobby and his official biographer , Albert Bigelow Paine , to reflect on his life and current events . By the time these meetings ended more than 250 dictations had been produced and the autobiography ran in excess of 500,000 words ( Smith , 2010b ). In its printed form , Autobiography of Mark Twain : The Complete and Authoritative Edition , published by UC Press in 2010 , contains more than 2000 pages spread over three volumes and consists largely of Twain ’ s dictations .
The appearance of the UC Press edition 100 years after Twain ’ s death in 1910 capitalizes on a convenient marketing angle provided by none other than the author himself . Twenty-five excerpts from the autobiography were published by Twain in the North American Review during his lifetime ; each contains an announcement that the work will not be published “ in book form ” until after his death ( Smith , 2010c ). What may have been a marketing ploy was also framed as a public benefit . Delaying publication , Twain reasoned , would allow him to produce a more honest account of himself . In 1899 , Twain mused in an interview “ a book that is not to be published for a century gives the writer a freedom which he could secure in no other way . In these conditions you can draw a man without prejudice exactly as you knew him and yet have no fear of hurting his feelings or those of his sons or grandsons ” ( Smith , 2010d ). Six years later Twain took this sentiment to heart , suppressing his dictated autobiography to protect his reputation and benefit future generations :
“ I ’ d like to see a lot of this stuff in print before I die — but not the bulk of it , on no ! I am not desiring to be crucified yet . Howells thinks the Auto will outlive the Innocents Abroad a thousand years , & I know it will . I would like the literary world to see ( as Howells says ) that the form of this book is one of the most memorable literary inventions of the ages . And so it is . It ranks with the steam engine , the printing press & the electric telegraph . I ’ m the only person who has ever found out the right way to build an autobiography .” ( Smith , 2010e )
The company in which Twain places his text suggests that he viewed the Autobiography as a technological advance that would improve the circulation of information in its wake . Whatever we make of the mix of public and private factors driving his decision to withhold this
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