“A hundred and one years after his death, Mark Twain still knows how to move books. The first volume of the Autobiography of Mark Twain, published by the University of California Press last year, now has half-a-million copies in print. It has spent 16 weeks on the New York Times hardcover-nonfiction best-seller list. (It’s now just ahead of Keith Richards’s memoir.)
“And it doesn’t seem to be letting up,” Robert H. Hirst told an audience at the National Endowment for the Humanities headquarters here Wednesday. Mr. Hirst is the general editor of the Mark Twain Project and curator of the Mark Twain Papers, housed at the Bancroft Library at the University of California at Berkeley.
The editor was in town to talk about the process of getting the Autobiography into the hands of Twain’s still-adoring public—and to emphasize the role public money, in the form of financial support from the humanities endowment, helped play in making it happen. In a lecture chock-full of colorful Twain anecdotes—always a crowd-pleaser—Mr. Hirst described how Twain Project editors and graduate students spent the last five years sifting through and collating 5,000 pages of manuscript and trying to figure out how to organize it as Twain wanted.” – Jennifer Howard, The Chronicle
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