I want to reflect at some length on the ways Samuel Langhorne Clemens thought about and represented his own life. The interest of the task is inseparable from its complexity, for my subject was fixed by a lifelong fascination with his myriad and finally ungraspable self, and with such kindred matters as human nature, the fathomless depths of the human mind, and the challenge of autobiography. The writer’s thoughts never strayed for long from the events of his past. “Yes,” he observed in 1886, “the truth is, my books are simply autobiographies.”¹ Clemens’s potent autobiographical impulse was the expression of...

In hisColors of the Mind: Conjectures on Thinking in Literature, Angus Fletcher makes the case for what he calls “noetics,” critical inquiry into “the precise activity occurring when the poet introduces thought as a discriminable dimension of the form and meaning of the poem.” He continues: “If poetics shows us the ways by which the poet arranges his poem so that it will cohere poetically, as a thing made, then noetics shows us how thoughts, ideas, reflections, memories, judgments, intuitions, and visions are involved in the fundamental process of the making of the poem.” Fletcher’s interest falls squarely on...

“Unconsciously we all have a standard by which we measure other men,” Clemens declared in a 1909 autobiographical dictation. “We admire them, we envy them, for great qualities which we ourselves lack. Hero worship consists in just that. Our heroes are men who do the things which we recognize, with regret, and sometimes with a secret shame, that we cannot do. We find not much in ourselves to admire, we are always privately wanting to be like somebody else. If everybody was satisfied with himself, there would be no heroes.”¹

What a perfectly apt—and poignant—commentary on Clemens’s overflowing...

I have argued that Clemens’s explicitly autobiographical writing arose out of a need to confess the truth about himself, and failed because of a countervailing need to conceal the same thing. He recognized his failure for what it was, but knew at the same time that the dark truth would out, the exertions of the vigilant author-cat notwithstanding. It followed—though Clemens was slow to draw this inference—that guilty self-revelations would surface most readily in his travel books and novels, where license to fictionalize doubled as a sedative to the censors. The guilty truth was thus most likely to...

Clemens’s later life was crossed by extremes of adversity and emotional upheaval. The worst of the trouble began in 1894 when, after years of imprudent financial speculation, he suffered a humiliating plunge into bankruptcy. He partially righted himself by undertaking an around-the-world lecture tour, but that brief triumph was bitterly overturned by news that his favorite daughter, Susy, had succumbed to spinal meningitis in August 1896. The shock was so great that Clemens wavered between feelings of hatred for life and blank indifference to what it might bring. Death, he decided, was a blessing, and he looked forward to his...

The fourth and final volume of Albert Bigelow Paine’sMark Twain: A Biographyis much more detailed than the other three. This is because it records the last few years of Clemens’s life, when Paine, now the “official” biographer and trusted member of the humorist’s household, enjoyed the privileged access of a friend and confidant. As Paine proudly announces at the very beginning of volume 4, “We have reached a point in this history where the narrative becomes mainly personal” (MTB, 4:1257). Given what we know of Paine’s awe of Clemens, and of his assiduous commitment, after his subject’s death,...