He was so famous that fan letters addressed to "Mark Twain, God knows where" and "Mark Twain. Somewhere (Try Satan)" found their way to him; the White House accommodatingly forwarded something addressed to "Mark Twain, c/o President Roosevelt". Like Charles Dickens, Twain achieved immense success with his first book, became his nation's most famous and best-loved author, and has remained a national treasure ever since – America's most archetypal writer, an instantly recognisable, white-haired, white-suited, folksy, cantankerous icon. Since his death on 21 April 1910, Twain's writings have reportedly inspired more commentary than those of any other American author and have been translated into at least 72 languages. Despite being dead for a century, Twain is not only as celebrated as ever, he is also, apparently, just as productive: the first volume of his unexpurgated three-volume autobiography has appeared for the first time this month, a hundred years after his death.
Like the premature news of his death, however, reports that his autobiography has been embargoed for a century in honour of the author's wishes are somewhat exaggerated. He did indeed decree that it should be withheld for 100 years after his death, but various heavily edited versions have appeared since then, controlled by Twain's surviving daughter, Clara, his first biographer, Albert Bigelow Paine, and subsequent editors, all of whom cut anything they deemed offensive or problematic, standardised Twain's idiosyncratic punctuation, and reordered the narrative to create precisely the conventional cradle-to-grave structure he explicitly rejected.
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