Review: Autobiography Of Mark Twain, Vol. 2

Autobiography Of Mark Twain, Vol. 2 by Mark Twain
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

While I usually greatly enjoy Mark Twain’s writings, this was a chore. This is really a compilation of the multiple autobiographies he started at various times throughout his life. I listened to volume 1, and found some chronology applied to the writings. Here, the stories jumped back and forth in time, making it hard to picture exactly when Twain was talking about. It was quite confusing throughout the book. And you can tell this is a mildly edited version of Twain’s work – he didn’t expect this all to see the light of day in anything like the format it is in. This includes long passages that have little place in an autobiography. For example, there is a large section, really unrelated to anything else, about testing different palm readers. Even more of the book is about Twain’s fight for longer copyright laws that he admits would only help about 25 writers of the time, himself predominately. In total, this isn’t a good picture of Twain.

But in the pieces, you can find the Twain that people loved. My favorite bit involves something he wrote in “Roughing It”. He repeats a rather lousy joke three times if I recall about Horace Greeley on a stagecoach. In this book, Twain talks about his idea that repeating a bad joke repeatedly would get people to laugh, and he related how twice he did this in front of a live audience – same awful joke as in the book. I appreciated when I read that in “Roughing It” and figured out his intent. This was an excellent retelling of Twain re-using his material over the years.

There were also plenty of times throughout where I laughed at the audacity of Twain’s writing. He could go along boring the reader on purpose for paragraphs at a time to get in a line that just killed.

The three volume Autobiography , where this is book 2, includes Twain’s writings that he didn’t want people to see for 100 years after his death. The first book didn’t have much of that, but Twain mentions it quite a few times in this volume. None of his restricted material matters much now, mostly complaining about business. Oh well, it’s always good to read humorous Twain, even if, like in this volume, you have to pick through his castoffs to get there. I liked this more on reflection than I did when I read it.

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