Andrew Price
Projects, GOOD
Mark Twain, the "father of American literature" (according to William Faulker, at least), spent the last decade of his life working on a brutally honest autobiography. Before he died, he stipulated that it shouldn't be published for 100 years. That was in 1910.The University of California, Berkeley, which has been holding this 5,000-page memoir in a vault, will publish the first volume this November. The autobiography details his romantic relationship with his secretary, Isabel Van Kleek Lyon; his doubts about God, American foreign policy, and Theodore Roosevelt; and criticisms of supposed friends. The inflammatory content is one reason people think Twain wanted to delay the autobiography by a century.
As Robert Hirst, the man editing the text, says, "he was certainly a man who knew how to make people want to buy a book."
Via Boing Boing.
