New Discoveries of Twain Writings Continue

More than a century after Mark Twain's death, and more than six decades after UC Berkeley scholars began combing through his literary remains, one might think we've discovered everything he wrote and published everything worth publishing.

One would be wrong, perhaps very wrong.

"We're far from having seen everything Mark Twain wrote," Bob Hirst, general editor of the Mark Twain Project at UC Berkeley, told a Kensington audience Monday night.

"We still find on the average three new letters a week — a week," he said. "And that means basically information that you can find in the letters is continuing to come out."

Speaking as part of a six-week series of "" events devoted to Twain, Hirst offered glimpses of his own discoveries during the 44 years he's worked on the project, including the past 31 as its chief pilot.

Hirst devoted special attention to a letter that Twain wrote as a young man of 29 in San Francisco to his brother Orion and Orion's wife Mollie in October of 1865.

"This is what I call the most important letter he ever wrote," Hirst said.

In the letter, Twain says he's had two "powerful ambitions" in his life — to be a pilot and a preacher. The first he accomplished and the second he failed to do because he lacked "the necessary stock in trade—i.e. religion."

So, he declares, he will take up a new calling:

"But I have had a 'call' to literarture, of a low order—i.e. humorous," Twain wrote. "It is nothing to be proud of, but it is my strongest suit, & if I were to listen to that maxim of stern duty which says that to do right you must multiply the one or the two or the three talents which the Almighty entrusts to your keeping, I would long ago have ceased to meddle with things for which I was by nature unfitted & turned my attention to seriously scribbling to excite the laughter of God’s creatures."

Luckily for Twain scholarship and later readers, Twain's brother did not follow the instructions that Twain added to the letter:

"P. S. You had better shove this in the stove ... I don’t want any absurd 'literary remains' & 'unpublished letters of Mark Twain' published after I am planted."

The keepers of the Twain archive have collected approximately 11,000 letters by Twain and his immediate family. "Letters are the royal road to inside biography, the royal road to knowing what a person is like," Hirst said.

The ongoing Twain project at Berkeley is one of the largest research efforts ever devoted to collecting and publishing the work of a single author. So far it has issued more than three dozen, painstakingly edited volumes with more to come.

Last year, the centennial of Twain's death, the project published the first of three volumes of Twain's autobiography. Twain had allowed portions of his autobiography, often without names, to be published in his lifetime, but before he died, he issued instructions that the entire, unexpurgated work remain unpublished until 100 years after his death.

The Hirst talk before two dozen people at the was sponsored by the as part of its "Kensington Reads: One City, One Book" program. It is devoted to reading Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and gaining a deeper knowledge of Twain and his work. The full schedule of events is available on the library's web site.