Audiobook · read by volunteers
Chapters from my Autobiography
Mark Twain (1835–1910)
Read by John Greenman · 25 chapters · 10 h 34
About the book
Mark Twain once planned to leave his memoirs unpublished until after his death. Then, past seventy, he decided that some of the material was safe enough to share while he was still around to enjoy the reaction. The result is a gathering of chapters first printed in a magazine in 1906 and 1907: stories about people, places and incidents from a long, crowded life, told in the unhurried, mischievous voice of a man who knows exactly how to hold an audience. Some pages are comic, some are sharp, some are unexpectedly tender, including passages that quote his daughter Susy’s own biography of him, written when she was a girl. Twain wanders, digresses and circles back, and you never quite mind. Twenty-five chapters, more than ten hours, and a single reader who stays with you from the first anecdote to the last.
Introduction
Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835–1910), better known as Mark Twain, spent much of his later life thinking about how to write his own story. He started and abandoned several versions of an autobiography, tried different orders and methods, and decided at one point that the full text should only appear after his death. The pieces gathered here were published in serial form in the North American Review in 1906 and 1907, the year after he turned seventy. Twain also had a practised performer’s sense of timing, which is why so many of these chapters sound as if they were made to be spoken in front of an audience.
The result is not a tidy chronological account. It is a conversation with the reader, a mixture of reminiscence, humour, opinion and affection. Twain recalls people he knew, places he lived and incidents that stayed with him, and he lets his attention drift where it will. A notable thread is the set of excerpts from Susy’s biography of her father, in which a young girl’s candid observations meet the author’s own commentary.
For listeners familiar with Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn, this is a chance to meet the man behind them in his own words. For those who have not read him, it is a warm and funny introduction to his voice.
The recording has 25 chapters and runs about ten and a half hours. It is read by a single LibriVox volunteer, which suits a text so personal. Twain’s humour has aged well, and it is a pleasure to hear a long life recounted with such ease.
Public domain
Mark Twain died in 1910: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text