Excerpts from the Autobiography of Mark Twain

Excerpts From the ‘Autobiography of Mark Twain’
Published: July 9, 2010



One hundred years after his death, the University of California Press is publishing the “Autobiography of Mark Twain: The Complete and Authoritative Edition” in a series of three volumes, edited by Harriet Elinor Smith and the editors of the Mark Twain Project. It will be the first time the entire text has appeared in print. Here are some of Twain’s spicier comments, all drawn from Volume 1.

Look Who’s Got a Best Seller: Mark Twain’s Autobiography Is Hot (November 20, 2010)
Dead for a Century, Twain Says What He Meant (July 10, 2010) ON THEODORE ROOSEVELT

“Theodore Roosevelt is one of the most impulsive men in existence ... He flies from one thing to another with incredible dispatch — throws a somersault and is straightaway back again where he was last week. He will then throw some more somersaults and nobody can foretell where he is finally going to land after the series. Each act of his, and each opinion expressed, is likely to abolish or controvert some previous act or expressed opinion. That is what is happening to him all the time as president.”

ON THE MEANING OF THANKSGIVING

“Thanksgiving Day, a function which originated in New England two or three centuries ago when those people recognized that they really had something to be thankful for — annually, not oftener — if they had succeeded in exterminating their neighbors, the Indians, during the previous twelve months instead of getting exterminated by their neighbors the Indians. Thanksgiving Day became a habit, for the reason that in the course of time, as the years drifted on, it was perceived that the exterminating had ceased to be mutual and was all on the white man’s side, consequently on the Lord’s side, consequently it was proper to thank the Lord for it.”

ON THE AMERICAN BUSINESS CLASS

“The multimillionaire disciples of Jay Gould — that man who in his brief life rotted the commercial morals of this nation and left them stinking when he died — have quite completely transformed our people from a nation with pretty high and respectable ideals to just the opposite of that; that our people have no ideals now that are worthy of consideration; that our Christianity which we have always been so proud of — not to say vain of — is now nothing but a shell, a sham, a hypocrisy; that we have lost our ancient sympathy with oppressed peoples struggling for life and liberty; that when we are not coldly indifferent to such things we sneer at them, and that the sneer is about the only expression the newspapers and the nation deal in with regard to such things.”