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It is an extraordinary story. When he died in 1910, Mark Twain left behind some 5,000 unedited pages of memoirs, together with instructions saying that he did not want them to be published until at least 100 years after his death, perhaps fearing that their shock value would damage his reputation or heirs: “There may be a market for that kind of wares a century from now. There is no hurry. Wait and see.” That century has now passed, meaning that at last the great American writer’s unexpurgated autobiography can be read, as the University of California publishes the first of three volumes.

Here, author and critic Roger Boylan gives his thoughts on the ‘unexpurgated’ Twain for The Dabbler.

The opinions that Samuel Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, expresses in his unexpurgated Autobiography, the first volume of which has just been published are, by and large, less surprising than the force with which he expresses them. That Twain took a dim view of politics, for instance, would not have startled his contemporaries, who knew him as a hardened cynic on the subject, responsible after all for such witticisms as “Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.”

His views on religion, too, were widely known–“Man is kind enough when he is not excited by religion” (although the full extent of his apostasy only became apparent much later, with the posthumous publication of the deeply anti-religious Letters from the Earth), but the autobiographical Twain we meet in Volume 1 of his autobiography ranges beyond attacking concepts and institutions; he gleefully mauls individual personalities, too. Here, for instance, he outlines a suitable retribution for one James Paige, inventor of a typesetting machine in which he (Twain) invested, and lost, heavily.

Paige and I always meet on effusively affectionate terms, and yet he knows perfectly well that, if I had his nuts in a steel trap, I would shut out all human succor and watch that trap until he died.

In counterpoint, however, his fond memories of his wife Livy, who died in 1904, are some of the most affecting parts of this book. His love for her was unbounded and true, and it still shines forth.

She was slender and beautiful and girlish—and she was both girl and woman. She remained both girl and woman to the last day of her life. Under a grave and gentle exterior burned inextinguishable fires of sympathy, energy, devotion, enthusiasm, and absolutely limitless affection. She was always frail in body, and she lived upon her spirit, whose hopefulness and courage were indestructible.

And, cantankerous as he was with others, he could be unsparing with himself, as when he looks back over his long marriage.

I have known few meaner men than I am. By good fortune this feature of my nature does not often get to the surface, and I doubt if any member of my family except my wife ever suspected how much of that feature there was in me… Mrs. Clemens suffered from it, and I … suffer from the remembrance of the tears it caused her.

He may have had his mean moments, but a truly mean man would be incapable of such candor.

A lengthier review by Roger can be read at the Boston Review.