Estate Planning

Twain Autobiography - Finally Published?

By Hull and Hull LLP

Imagine for a moment that you go back to read your diary entries from your 'Are you there God? Its me, Margaret' days.   You think to yourself, ‘these are pretty good, maybe I should put them together and write my life story'. So you sit down, get to editing and write your autobiography. For most people, a venture through their personal history leads to some reminiscing with friends or a good laugh, but not much more; For Mark Twain, it has led to a century old legacy.  

I don't think my life story would be widely read, and thus have no current plans to write it. What's more, even if I did write it, I don't think I would instruct my executors to leave it unpublished for 100 years - but that is exactly what Mark Twain did. The most amazing part is that not only were those his instructions, but that his story is still relevant today, and is about to be published.

The author who changed the face of American literature with novels like ‘Tom Sawyer' and ‘The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn', passed away in 1910, and since 1962, The University of California at Berkeley has held Twain's autobiography, beginning a count down to 2010. Although parts of his autobiographical work have been published in other biographies, the anniversary of Twain's death will be celebrated, beginning on November of this year, with the publication of the first of three installments of his autobiography. 

As part of his autobiography, Twain apparently was critical of Christian missionaries in Africa; but he didn't limit his critique to the foreign, he also allegedly wrote negatively about Theodore Roosevelt and many others.   If nothing else, the autobiography promises to be interesting with hopefully a touch of the humour that made Twain's fiction famous in the first place. I can only dream that 100 years from now someone will be reading this blog and saying the same thing.

Until tomorrow,

Nadia M. Harasymowycz - Click here to learn more about Nadia Harasymowycz

Full post as published by Toronto Estate Law Blog on June 02, 2010 (boomark / email).