Mark Twain ordered that his auto­bi­og­ra­phy, which he had been dic­tat­ing for a num­ber of years to a stenog­ra­pher friend, not be pub­lished until a hun­dred years after his death. Since he died in 1910, his auto­bi­og­ra­phy was released last year. It is a gift to be alive now to read it with­out a sin­gle tread of another foot on its pages. Here is one para­graph. More to come soon:

It is a world of sur­prises. They fall, too, where one is least expect­ing of them. When I intro­duced Sell­ers into the book, Charles Dud­ley Warner, who was writ­ing the story with me, pro­posed a change of Sellers’s Chris­t­ian name. Ten years before, in a remote cor­ner of the West, he had come across a man named Eschol Sell­ers, and he thought that Eschol was just the right and fit­ting name for our Sell­ers, since it was odd, and quaint, and all that. I liked the idea, but I said that that man might turn up and object. But Warner said it couldn’t hap­pen; that he was doubt­less dead by this time, a man with a name like that couldn’t live long; and be he dead or alive we must have the name, it was exactly the right one and we couldn’t do with­out it. So the change was made. Warner’s man was a farmer in a cheap and hum­ble way. When the book had been out a week, a college-bred gen­tle­man of courtly man­ners and ducal uphol­stery arrived in Hart­ford in a sul­try state of mind and with a libel suit in his eye, and his name was Eschol Sell­ers! He had never heard of the other one, and had never been within a thou­sand miles of him. This dam­aged aristocrat’s pro­gram was quite def­i­nite and business-like: the Amer­i­can Pub­lish­ing Com­pany must sup­press the edi­tion as far as printed, and change the name in the plates, or stand a suit for $10,000. He car­ried away the Company’s promise and many apolo­gies, and we changed the name back to Colonel Mul­berry Sell­ers, in the plates. Appar­ently there is noth­ing that can­not hap­pen. Even the exis­tence of two unre­lated men wear­ing the impos­si­ble name of Eschol Sell­ers is a pos­si­ble thing.

p. 207

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Tags: autobiography, literature, Mark Twain, samuel clemens, the autobiography of mark twain