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Portrait, 1870s
Courtesy of The Mark Twain Project, Bancroft Library, Berkeley |
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“There has never been a time in the past thirty-five years when my literary shipyard hadn’t two or more half-finished ships on the ways, neglected and baking in the sun; generally there have been three or four; at present there are five...As long as a book would write itself I was a faithful and interested amanuensis and my industry did not flag, but the minute that book tried to shift to my head the labor of contriving its situations, inventing its adventures and conducting its conversations, I put it away and dropped it out of my mind.”—Mark Twain, Autobiography, posthumous
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Manuscript from Tom Sawyer,
Chapter 6, page 125
Courtesy of The Mark Twain
Project, Bancroft Library, Berkeley |
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Real Video: 56k | 220k
Hamilin Hill,
“My Books
are Water” |
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“But the truth is, that when a Library expels a book of mine and leaves an unexpurgated Bible lying around where unprotected youth and age can get hold of it, the deep unconscious irony of it delights me and doesn’t anger me.”—Mark Twain, Letter to Mrs. Whitmore, 1907
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 | Plot Outline for Huckleberry Finn
Courtesy of The Mark Twain Project,
Bancroft Library, Berkeley |
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“When the [Tom Sawyer] manuscript had lain in a pigeonhole two years I took it out one day and read the last chapter that I had written. It was then that I made the great discovery that when the tank runs dry you’ve only to leave it alone and it will fill up again in time, while you are asleep—also while you are at work at other things and are quite unaware that this unconscious and profitable cerebration is going on. There was plenty of material now and the book went on and finished itself without any trouble.”—Mark Twain, Autobiography, posthumous
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