Mark Twain To Reveal All After 100 Year Wait 298
Hugh Pickens writes "The Independent reports that one of Mark Twain's dying wishes is at last coming true: an extensive, outspoken and revelatory autobiography which he devoted the last decade of his life to writing is finally going to be published one hundred years after his death. Twain, the pen name of Samuel Clemens, left behind 5,000 unedited pages of memoirs when he died in 1910, together with handwritten notes saying that he did not want them to hit bookshops for at least a century, but in November, the University of California, Berkeley, where the manuscript is in a vault, will release the first volume of Mark Twain's three-volume autobiography. Scholars are divided as to why Twain wanted his autobiography kept under wraps for so long, with some believing it was because he wanted to talk freely about issues such as religion and politics. Michael Shelden, who this year published Man in White, an account of Twain's final years, says that some of his privately held views could have hurt his public image. 'He had doubts about God, and in the autobiography, he questions the imperial mission of the US in Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines,' says Shelden. 'He's also critical of [Theodore] Roosevelt, and takes the view that patriotism was the last refuge of the scoundrel. Twain also disliked sending Christian missionaries to Africa. He said they had enough business to be getting on with at home: with lynching going on in the South, he thought they should try to convert the heathens down there.' Interestingly enough, Twain had a cunning plan to beat the early 20th century copyright law with its short copyright terms. Twain planned to republish every one of his works the moment it went out of copyright with one-third more content, hoping that availability of such 'premium' version will make prints based on the out-of-copyright version less desirable on the market."
Re:Adding to the Speculation (Score:5, Informative)
For the record, his stance on copyright (Score:5, Informative)
from a speech which he gave before Congress:
http://www.bpmlegal.com/cotwain.html [bpmlegal.com]
William
Re:Adding to the Speculation (Score:4, Informative)
For another good look at Twain's world view regarding mankind and religion, I'd say read What is Man? [gutenberg.org].
Re:That is a pretty good quote (Score:5, Informative)
Penned by Samuel Johnson, actually. Not sure if the Shelden got his Samuels mixed up or if he was just saying that Clemens shared the thought that originated with Johnson.
But yea. Good quote.
Re:Copyrights (Score:4, Informative)
Nobody. Even if you were using today's rules, it's life + 70 years, which means that it would have expired 30 years ago. That makes this public domain.
Re:Adding to the Speculation (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Copyrights (Score:3, Informative)
Copyright extends from the date when it is published, not from when it is written (which is much harder to prove). The question is whether handing it over to UCB counted as publication - probably not, in which case the copyright is owned by whoever owns the physical manuscript.
In most cases this makes sense. Copyright doesn't exist to encourage people to write, it exists to encourage them to publish their writings and you shouldn't get any benefit from it if you are not publishing (DRM-locked distribution channels and regional distribution agreements violate the spirit of this).
Re:That is a pretty good quote (Score:4, Informative)
That's exactly the point of the quote. People claim patriotism as a reason when it's just a ruse for terrible behavior. See also: "It's for the children" and "Drugs are bad".
Re:Copyrights (Score:3, Informative)
That's not true, in most countries, including the US I think, the copyright can start from the date of creation as well, depending on circumstances. To prove something like this, you could mail the work to yourself, and use the post's stamps for date verification, for example.
Anyhow, in this case the work is in public domain, since unpublished and unregistered works get life of author + 70 years [cornell.edu].
Re:Copyrights (Score:4, Informative)
Copyright extends from the date when it is published
Only in the case of a) works that were created before 1978 and published before 2003, and b) works made for hire. Everything else is life plus 70.
Re:Adding to the Speculation (Score:2, Informative)
Oh noes! Women no longer want to be just baby factories! How dare them! Written by a person who is guaranteed to be single for life.
Oh, cheer up, AC. I'm sure there's someone out there who could love you. Best of luck.
Re:Adding to the Speculation (Score:3, Informative)
Except I've seen good parents produce bad kids, and good kids that come from bad upbringings. Although I'm proud of the way I raised my kids, parenting is overrated; there are too many other variables involved -- school, TV, other kids, circumstances beyond anyone's control, etc. Even if every parent was a perfect parent, we would still have social injustice.
BTW, Einstein didn't build the bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer [wikipedia.org] did. Einstein's [wikipedia.org] work was far more valuable than simply making the atom bomb; without his work much of today's physics and engineering would be impossible.
Re:As a competitor to Bill Gates, Mark Twain faile (Score:5, Informative)
Mark Twain aka Samuel Clemens was a person who came from a humble background and married into wealth, but his appetite for the fine things that money could bring exceeded whatever came his way by way of his wife's family.
Having worked as a newspaper "printer's devil", he saw his path to the riches required for the life style to which he had become accustomed in the Paige Compositor -- essentially a Victorian Era version of MS-Word implemented largely in hardware, making "leveraged" investments in this invention.
The Paige compositor failed in the marketplace, more sophisticated than its competitor the Linotype -- kind of like the tale of a "death march" failed software or computer hardware project some 100 years later. Twain lost all of his money and then money he didn't have. To make good on his debts, he went on a worldwide lecture tool, essentially doing impressions of Hal Holbrooke pretending to be Mark Twain.
Not only did the speaking fees from this grueling tour pay back his debts in full and then some, it made him immortal. Were it not for the fame of the speaking tour and connecting with audiences around the world with his personal appearances in a day before TV and cable and talk shows, he may as well been forgetten as many a 19'th century humorist.
So remember, what made Mark Twain a household word even into the 21'st Century was one, the man's greed, and two, an antecedant to the personal computer.
Uh ... no, not really. Not at all, in fact.
True, Twain put most the considerable wealth he had gained into the development of the Compositor (he himself estimated he spent $150,000 on it, but his biographer A. B. Paine estimated his investment at $190,000, and his friend William Dean Howells put the figure at $3000,000 - and these estimate are all in 19th century dollars). He believed there was both a demand and a need for it, based on his early career as a printer's devil. It did not "fail in the marketplace", however. In fact [marktwainhouse.org], only two prototypes were ever built, and the machine "collapsed" prior to its only demonstration before a group of investors in 1890.
It wasn't greed that motivated him. Like modern Internet billionaires investing in private space travel, he believed in the technology, and put his money where his mouth was.
As for the allegations of his being a "poor husband and neglectful father", nothing could be further from the truth. He adored his wife Livy, worshipped his daughters, and was devastated when his only son Langdon died of diptheria at age two. It was at Livy's insistence that he undertook a worldwide lecture tour to repay 100 cents on the dollar of the debts from his various bad investments (Paige's Compositor wasn't the only one), particularly the collapse of his publishing house, The Charles L. Webster Company. And, after their daughter Susy died of meningitis on a visit to their mansion in Hartford, Connecticut while Twain was on tour in Europe, he and Livy were so overcome with grief that they were never able to bring themselves to return to Hartford.
"Poor husband and neglectful father?" I don' theeng so, Quickstraw ...
Re:Adding to the Speculation (Score:3, Informative)
His criticisms did get increasingly harsh as time went on, esp. about US military action overseas -- for example, The War Prayer [midwinter.com]. At one point, he suggested that this [daughtersoftiresias.org] be the new American flag. He had a lot of pressure on him not to ruin his reputation by being too vocal of an antiwar voice.