My brilliant career

While it is clearly a product of the 19th century, the book anticipates the contemporary memoir in form and in its attitude toward objectivity. It eschews simple chronological order, opting instead to follow Twain’s own internal logic, and Twain makes clear that this book is a product of memory, not a history. Beyond all that, despite its daunting heft, the work provides distinct pleasures for even the casual Twain fan.

The production of the book spanned about half of Twain’s life. Twain wrote volume I’s first entry in 1870, the same year of his marriage to Olivia Langdon of Elmira, N.Y., when he was 35. At the time he was the author of just one book, one of his funniest, a travelogue called “The Innocents Abroad.’’ (His greatest work, “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,’’ would not be published in the United States until 1885.)

For the next 35 years Twain would complete over 30 entries, but could not sustain this rate of progress on the project beyond that point. Small wonder, considering his other endeavors at the time. Possessed with an almost otherworldly energy level, Twain wrote in excess of 50,000 letters, more than 3,000 newspaper and magazine articles, and more than 30 books.

With all this activity, it was not until December 1906, approximately three and a half years before his death at age 74, that he was finally ready to sit down long enough to reflect on his life and work and follow a regular daily schedule of dictations. By December 1909 when he completed the final chapter — a moving eulogy of his youngest daughter, Jean, a severe epileptic who died of heart failure — he had dictated more than 250 daily entries.

While Twain left specific instructions that no complete text of his “Autobiography’’ could be published until 100 years after his death, in 1906 he oversaw and approved excerpts that were published over 16 months in the North American Review. Over the decades, several edited versions of these excerpts have been produced, with the best being Michael Kiskis’ edition of “Mark Twain’s Own Autobiography: The Chapters from the North American Review.’’