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This third and final volume crowns and completes his life´s work. Like its companion volumes, it chronicles Twain´s inner and outer life through a series of daily dictations that go wherever his fancy leads. The Autobiography´s "Closing Words" movingly commemorate his daughter Jean, who died on Christmas Eve 1909. Also included in this volume is the previously unpublished "Ashcroft-Lyon Manuscript," Mark Twain´s caustic indictment of his "putrescent pair" of secretaries and the havoc that erupted in his house during their residency. Fitfully published in fragments at intervals throughout the twentieth century, Autobiography of Mark Twain has now been critically reconstructed and made available as it was intended to be read. Fully annotated by the editors of the Mark Twain Project, the complete Autobiography emerges as a landmark publication in American literature.

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Benjamin Griffin and Harriet Elinor Smith are editors at the Mark Twain Project, which is housed within the Mark Twain Papers, the world´s largest archive of primary materials by this major American writer. Under the direction of General Editor Robert H. Hirst, the Project´s editors are producing the first comprehensive edition of all of Mark Twain´s writings.

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