Mark Twain’s autobiography to be published in full, 100 years after his death

Just over 100 years ago, Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, passed away as Halley’s Comet passed in the sky. He left behind him a 500,000-word autobiographical manuscript, under strict instructions that it was not to be published until at least one hundred years after his death.

As to why such a long delay, it’s not entirely clear. Perhaps he wanted to avoid embarrassing friends, or near descendents of friends, with some of the harsh things he had to say. Perhaps the controversial Clemens simply enjoyed the knowledge that, a century after he had passed on, he would cause one final ruckus in a society whose nature he could not even hope to imagine.

Regardless, one thing is clear: the complete manuscript has never been published in full. Excerpts ran in magazines before Clemens’s death, and parts were published in three previous “autobiographies” with the estate’s permission, but over half of the work has not been seen by anyone other than researchers who visited Berkeley’s Bancroft library in person.

"There are so many biographies of Twain, and many of them have used bits and pieces of the autobiography," Dr. [Robert Hirst, who is leading the team at Berkeley editing the complete text] said. "But biographers pick and choose what bits to quote. By publishing Twain’s book in full, we hope that people will be able to come to their own complete conclusions about what sort of a man he was."

The manuscript is going to be published as a trilogy starting in November. It’s unclear whether there will be an e-book edition—I can’t even find an official page on Berkeley listing its publication date, though I may not be looking in the right place.

Of course, given that copyright is currently life of author plus 50 years, or plus 70 years in the case of unpublished manuscripts, a hot discussion topic going on over at BoingBoing is whether the work would be in the public domain.

One commenter thinks that the parts of the work that were published during Clemens’s lifetime and the parts have never before been published would be, and the parts published in the printed biographies that were published in 1924 and afterward would not, but I think it’s a lot simpler than that.

I’ve been told that when a work is edited, the edited edition of the work is considered an entirely new work for the purposes of copyright. I expect it will be considered to be authored by a corporation. Thus, in the best case scenario, it would be under copyright for 20 more years, since the current copyright term is

70 years after the death of author. If a work of corporate authorship, 95 years from publication or 120 years from creation, whichever expires first

Though, again, if the editing makes it an entirely new work, it could be under protection for 95 more years. Conversely, if someone snuck the manuscript out of Berkeley and published it unchanged, it could theoretically be in the public domain now (that “life + 70” thing). Of course, neither I nor the person who told me about this are copyright lawyers, so we could be entirely off-base. make of that what you will.

In a way, the confusion is a bit ironic—Clemens was one of the first strident advocates for perpetual copyright. During a speech he gave in 1906 on the occasion of congress considering a life + 50 copyright term, he said:

When I appeared before that committee of the House of Lords the chairman asked me what limit I would propose. I said, "Perpetuity." I could see some resentment in his manner, and he said the idea was illogical, for the reason that it has long ago been decided that there can be no such thing as property in ideas. I said there was property in ideas before Queen Anne’s time; they had perpetual copyright.

Clemens might well think that the confusion was our just dessert for not doing the sensible thing and implementing perpetual copyright!

Of course, the question has to be asked: what would Clemens think of e-books?

I think he’d be fairly enthusiastic about them. Clemens had a love for science, technology, and gadgets, sometimes to his own detriment—he invested most of his fortune and his wife’s inheritance in an early prototype typesetting machine that was obsolete a few years later. He was a friend of Nikola Tesla, was visited by Thomas Edison the year before his death, and even patented three inventions.

I think Clemens would be tickled pink to get to play around with a Kindle. Of course, he’d probably strongly insist on DRM for any new book he wrote (and would be upset that his works were all in the public domain by now).