The CHRON Reporter Debra Levi-Holtz fails to mention that The San Francisco Chronicle was once The SF Dramatic Chronicle, Twain's employer, after he was canned by The San Francisco Call. He was hired as an Entertainment Critic. He was never given a byline, to my knowledge, and took time out to work for the Sacramento Union and an expense account to travel abroad to The Holy Land. Twain did sign his first two big publishing successes "San Francisco", which should be mentioned by Holtz, if only for home town pride in The City.
Below is today's front page article, sans photos. Go to www.SFGATE.com for the images. (page A1, but probably not today if you're not a subscriber)
-Richard R - San Francisco/Oakland
(Twain Lane Improvement Effort - SF
<[log in to unmask]>)
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The San Francisco
Chronicle
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LITERATURE
Mark Twain is still surprising scholars
By Debra Levi Holtz
SPECIAL TO THE CHRONICLE
A century after his death, Mark Twain is back on the national best-seller lists, thanks to decades of work by some UC Berkeley scholars.
Editors from the Mark Twain Papers and Projects archive at the university’s Bancroft Library have released the first volume of the author’s unexpurgated autobiography, which contains some searing remarks about politics and Wall Street that still resonate today.
While the 736-page “Autobiography of Mark Twain” is written for scholars, even before publication it had jumped to the top of several best-seller lists, including those of The Chronicle, the New York Times and Amazon. com.
Twain, the pen name for Samuel L. Clemens, has been one of the country’s best-loved, and most controversial, authors. “Huckleberry Finn” and “Tom
Sawyer” have long been staples of high school reading lists. But four Twain experts at UC Berkeley, who have each spent 40 years immersed in his writings, will tell you they are just beginning to scratch the surface of the author and his work.
They work as editors at the university’s Twain archive, the
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[AP file photo] Samuel Clemens is better known by his pen name.
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Article Continued Below
Editors spend decades with Twain papers
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world’s largest collection of documents by and about the prolific writer and humorist.
Robert Hirst started working at the archive as a $3.21-an hour graduate student in 1967.
Even when he took a teaching job at UCLA in 1976, he continued to commute to Berkeley so he could work long weekends at the archive.
“The wonderfulness of it for us is
that we were thrown into the archive and told to go and find whatever we needed and get things done,” recalled Hirst, who was first captivated by Twain as an undergraduate at Harvard.
More to come
With two more volumes to be published over the next five years, the autobiography is the climax of the project’s mission to collect, edit and publish everything of significance ever written by Mark Twain. The collection now includes 600 unpublished literary manuscripts, 50 personal notebooks, thousands of letters and drafts of many essays, speeches and poems, as well as numerous photographs and drawings.
“His work involves so many different genres, so many different topics, so many different voices that it’s almost as if there were 30 writers all writing under the name Mark Twain,” said Shelly Fisher Fishkin, a Stanford University English professor who specializes in Twain.
Still discovering
Since 1980, Hirst has
been the curator and general editor of the Mark Twain Project and says the work continues to be exciting and unpredictable.
That might explain why Hirst and three of his fellow editors have remained there for the past four decades.
“It was quite clear to us early on that no one had exhausted the value of the archive and to this day they have not,” he said. “There are so many things here that we still find things which we didn’t know we had.”
Much has been made of reports that Twain did not want his entire autobiography published until 100 years after his death in 1910, so he was free to say whatever he wanted, no matter how irreverent.
Although that century-long embargo has finally ended, the timing of the autobiography’s publication is “fortuitous,” not deliberate, Hirst said.
What Twain intended
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Until three years ago, Hirst and his colleagues thought the dictations and
handwritten notes left by Twain were a chaotic series of drafts he had never finished and worried that they would have to arrange it chronologically as had editors of previous, censored versions. But they finally concluded that Twain intended for his life story to be published just as he had dictated it — in an unconventional, conversational style.
“When you basically discover that you’ve been sitting on the finished form of Mark Twain’s last major literary work, it’s enough to make your whole day,” Hirst said. “It’s very exciting.”
Like many Twain scholars from around the world, Fishkin often browses the stacks at the Mark Twain Project.
Among her discoveries in a filing cabinet was a play Mark Twain wrote in 1898 that was never published or produced.
Fishkin edited “Is He Dead? A Comedy in Three Acts” in 2003 and an adaptation of the play opened on Broadway in 2007.
“I think the Mark Twain
Project is one of our most extraordinary national resources,” said Fishkin. “The expertise, the dedication of the editors is unequaled in my view in any other author archive and I think that only a writer like Twain could elicit that kind of long-term devotion.
It’s impossible to get bored working on Mark Twain.”
E-mail Debra Levi Holtz at [log in to unmask]
“It was quite clear to us early on that no one had exhausted the value of the archive and to this day they have not. There are so many things here that we still find things which we didn’t know we had.”
-- Robert Hirst, curator, Mark Twain Project
[photo by Lea Suzuki / The Chronicle]
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