Mark Twain, the "father of American literature" (according to William Faulker, at least), spent the last decade of his life working on a brutally honest autobiography. Before he died, he stipulated that it shouldn't be published for 100 years. That was in 1910.
The University of California, Berkeley, which has been holding this 5,000-page memoir in a vault, will publish the first volume this November. The autobiography details his romantic relationship with his secretary, Isabel Van Kleek Lyon; his doubts about God, American foreign policy, and Theodore Roosevelt; and criticisms of supposed friends. The inflammatory content is one reason people think Twain wanted to delay the autobiography by a century.
As Robert Hirst, the man editing the text, says, "he was certainly a man who knew how to make people want to buy a book."
Via Good.
