Autobiography of Mark Twain / 1 The Mark Twain papers by Mark Twain

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12–13). [ 20 • I n t roduc t ion ] critic, but I have not talked a sentence yet that she has wanted altered. There are little slips here & there, little inexactnesses, & many desertions of a thought before the end of it has been reached, but these are not blemishes, they are merits, their removal would take away the naturalness of the flow & banish the very thing—the nameless something—which differentiates real narrative from artificial narrative & makes the one so vastly better than the other—the subtle something which makes good talk so much better than the best imitation of it that can be done with a pen.

In addition to Clemens himself, the travelers included Olivia, Clara, and Jean. Three employees were also with them: longtime family servant Katy Leary, a nurse for Olivia, and Isabel V. Lyon, who had been hired in 1902 as Olivia’s secretary but had since assumed more general duties. The Florentine Dictations (1904) During his eight-month stay in Florence Clemens made unusual progress on the autobiography, in large part because of a renewed enthusiasm for dictation as a method of composition. He had experimented with mechanical methods of transferring words to paper ever since the 46.

By the time Clemens added the second part to this self-revealing account, in the winter of 1893–94, Paige had still not perfected the machine but was about to sign a new, more satisfactory contract for it. Left in a rather unfinished state, the manuscript was very likely among those Clemens reviewed in 1906 before deciding to omit it from the final form. He did return to the subject in an Autobiographical Dictation of 2 June 1906. Vienna (1897 and 1898) Clemens’s hopes for the Paige typesetting machine were finally crushed in December 1894, and the bankruptcy of Webster and Company earlier that year had placed its debts solely on his shoulders.