Author: Lee Anne Titangos

“Harriet Elinor Smith was accustomed to anonymity. As lead editor for the “Autobiography of Mark Twain” and other Twain books, she has spent decades holed up with rare documents in a UC Berkeley office, fretting over commas and obscure references to 19th century personalities.

So Smith was stunned recently to be recognized by a fellow BART train passenger who had seen her on television, speaking about the astonishingly successful first volume of Twain’s massive memoir. The other woman even complimented Smith on her hairstyle.

Thrust into a publishing success about which other academics can only fantasize, Smith and her colleagues at UC Berkeley’s Mark Twain Papers & Project have become celebrities in the rarefied world of literary research and editing.” – Larry Gordon, Los Angeles Times

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“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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“Robert Hirst, general editor of the Mark Twain Project at UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library, went to Washington, D.C., this week. He shared with folks around the Beltway the story of the production of the first volume of the autobiography of legendary American author and humorist Samuel Langhorne Clemens, best known by his pen name Mark Twain.

Hirst delivered two talks about the publication of the “Autobiography of Mark Twain: The Complete and Authoritative Edition, Volume 1” (http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520267190) on Wednesday (Feb. 16).  The first was at the headquarters of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the second was on Capitol Hill, where Hirst was introduced by Claire McCaskill, a fourth-generation Missourian and senator from Twain’s home state.” – Kathleen Maclay, Media Relations

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Application Deadline: March 1st

The Magnes Fellowship in Jewish Studies was established to support for one academic year graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley, whose research would benefit from the use of source materials in the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, The Bancroft Library.

CRITERIA
Recipients of the Fellowship, designated as Magnes Fellows, shall be graduate students enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, who demonstrate high academic distinction. Students must be beyond the first year of graduate study.The amount of the award will cover fees and stipend for the graduate student for a year.

SELECTION
Applicant’s statement of purpose must describe how the research project will make use of the Magnes Collection. Selection committee, appointed by the Director of The Bancroft Library and including Jewish Studies Program faculty, will determine the recipient based on: statement of purpose, transcripts of undergraduate and graduate coursework, and three letters of recommendation from instructors.

The Bancroft Library will be open from 1pm to 5pm through January 3rd – 14th.

Normal hours of operation will resume January 18th. Please plan your research accordingly.