Mark Twain via last.fm

I’m so excited for this. I know what I’ll be doing for, say, most of 2011.  He’s one of the great American icons – a true fascination, and a half-million words sounds just about right to capture the measure of this man.

From The Independent:

The creator of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn and some of the most frequently misquoted catchphrases in the English language left behind 5,000 unedited pages of memoirs when he died in 1910, together with handwritten notes saying that he did not want them to hit bookshops for at least a century.

That milestone has now been reached, and in November the University of California, Berkeley, where the manuscript is in a vault, will release the first volume of Mark Twain’s autobiography. The eventual trilogy will run to half a million words, and shed new light on the quintessentially American novelist.

via kottke.org.

Read More:

• Mark Twain Autobiography Will Finally Be Published, Per Author’s Wish, 100 Years After His Death (huffingtonpost.com)
• Mark Twain’s autobiography to be finally published, 100 years after his death (boingboing.net)