Audiobook: Mark Twain’s Autobiography: With An Introduction by Albert Bigelow Paine – Volume I

While the Mark Twain Project has created and released a three-volume Mark Twain autobiography with extensive annotations, in the 21st century, this two-volume autobiography was published in 1924 and contains many works never before released. It came 14 years after Twain’s death and so, “speaking from the grave”, he felt he could be “as frank and free and unembarrassed as a love letter”. The autobiographical chapters that he published years earlier in the North American Review, were selected more for their acceptability and potential popularity than for their completely true reflection of his inner thoughts. With the publication of Mark Twain’s Autobiography in 1924, the world was introduced to a much more frank and less restrained Twain than had heretofore been seen or heard. This partial Autobiography, in two volumes, consisting of about two-fifths of his known material, was compiled by a personal friend and literary executor Albert Bigelow Paine, who at the time had exclusive access to Twain’s papers. – Summary by John Greenman and Wikipedia