With the publication of the third volume of the Autobiography of Mark Twain, Benjamin Griffin and Harriet Elinor Smith (and other editors of the Mark Twain Project) have completed perhaps the most daunting task in the history of Mark Twain scholarship. Now, at last, more than one hundred years after his death, we have, as the cover states, “the complete and authoritative edition.”
Volume 3, as well as Volume 2 before it, will not achieve the runaway best-seller status that the first volume attained upon its 2010 publication. The media hype surrounding that publication would perhaps have astonished and certainly delighted its author, who had suddenly and unexpectedly gone viral. General readers who were puzzled by the fragmentary attempts at autobiography before Twain arrived at his dictation method, the haphazard and apparently random structure once he did, and the many pages of notes and scholarly apparatus no doubt kept...
