Twain biography a publishing sensation

When the creator of Huckleberry Finn wrote his autobiography he insisted that it not be released until the 100th anniversary of his death.

Now,one hundred years after his death, the popularity of Mark Twain's autobiography has caught publishers by surprise.

Twain [Samuel L Clemens] insisted on the 100-year embargo before publication in order to allow himself to speak freely, to tell all – though the idea that he had been tight-lipped in his opinions up to that point would have come as news to both friends and enemies. The embargo was not honoured by his estate's trustees, and various abridged versions of the autobiography have appeared over the years. Never before has the book been published as Twain wished it, though – in all its fragmentary and convoluted glory.

Twain appears to have felt honour-bound, or fated, to attempt to do justice to his world-famous, white-suited life, while at the same time worrying that any attempt to contain his shifting enthusiasm, his incessant imagination, his scattergun prejudices and vitriol and jokes, was almost doomed from the outset. Among the many entertaining themes of this volume are the various and contradictory prefatory notes to self, about the impossibility of the project on which he is embarked: "What a little part of a person's life are his acts and his words!" he offers at one point. "His real life is in his head and is known to none but himself…" If this internal monologue were to be written, he suggests, prefiguring Leopold Bloom by 20 years, "every day would make a book of eighty thousand words, three hundred and sixty-five books a year. Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of a man – the biography of the man himself cannot be written…"

Like the river that became his greatest subject, there would have to be meanderings and digressive tributaries, sudden floods of drama and discarded ox-bows of comic observation; moreover it would, by necessity, just keep rolling along. That The Autobiography of Mark Twain should have been begun while the author was 42, and restarted and abandoned 30 or 40 times over the course of the next three decades, that it should have eventually done away with beginnings and middles and ends and sought to submerge the reader in the unstoppable narrative of what was on the mind of America's favourite writer on any morning he chose to compose it, should therefore come as no surprise. Neither should the fact that a century after the book concluded – with the author's death – much of it still reads as compulsively as if it were being dictated in the next room.

Twain's ultimate solution to this problem was to have a secretary follow him around and take down his every passing thought. This was "The Final (and Right) Plan" at which he laboured for much of the last six years of his life, first in Florence, Italy, and subsequently in New York and elsewhere, often from his bed. What the method lacked in logic, it made up in offering an authentic glimpse of how Twain's mind worked, or at least how it was working as he neared the end of his life.

Twain's great virtue as a writer, his genius, was his deliberate refusal of borrowed propriety or scale. The tallest of tales could be fashioned from the most modest of ingredients. That skill is fully on display here, as he magnifies the trivial – a hilarious attempt to send a letter to France from a London post office, for example – while providing conversational intimacy for great historical shifts – in his dismantling of the neo-colonialism of Theodore Roosevelt, say, or his championing of Booker T Washington's nascent civil rights fervour. In all of this it is prudent, he suggests, to bear in mind his mother's words about him as a boy: "I discount him thirty per cent for embroidery, and what is left is perfect and priceless truth without a flaw in it anywhere." It is good to know that the ratio served him well right up until the end.