Free Autobiography of Mark Twain by Mark Twain Page A

sequences are distinguishable by their differences in pagination and by minute differences in their typists’ styles. Collation demonstrates that TS2 and TS4 were both copied independently from the recently revised TS1, not one from the other. Both TS2 and TS4 originally began with the “Random Extracts” text, but both omit the “Early Attempt” preface written for it. TS4 includes the other three-part preface and four of the Florentine Dictations (“John Hay,” “Notes on ‘Innocents Abroad,’” “Robert Louis Stevenson and Thomas Bailey Aldrich,” and “Villa di Quarto”), and TS2 originally did so as well. But only parts of TS2 for these early texts survive: gaps in it (shown by missing page numbers) cannot always be certainly reconstructed, but all surviving evidence shows that the missing pages were identical in content to those of TS4, which is the only complete record of these initial elements in Clemens’s plan. This conjecture explains why the page numbers for the January-August 1906 dictations in TS2 and TS 4 are different from each other and consistently higher than the page numbers of TS1 for the corresponding dictation. TS 1
begins
with the Autobiographical Dictation of 9 January, having been started
before
Clemens decided to include any of the early material. 86

    FIGURE 2 . Manuscript page 1, Clemens’s title page.

    FIGURE 3 . Manuscript page 2, the “Early Attempt” preface introducing the “44 old type-written pages.”

    FIGURE 4 . Manuscript page 3, the instruction to insert what has now been identified as “My Autobiography [Random Extracts from It].”

    FIGURE 5 . Manuscript page 45, the first page of “The Latest Attempt” preface, numbered to continue the sequence after the inserted forty-four-page typescript. (The page number 9, and the numbers 10–17 on the following pages, were all added by Paine in pencil and were not part of Clemens’s plan.)

    FIGURE 6 . Manuscript page 46, the second page of “The Latest Attempt” preface.

    FIGURE 7 . Manuscript page 47, “THE FINAL (& RIGHT) PLAN,” originally placed immediately before the page inscribed with “Here begin the Florentine Dictations” (shown in figure 13 ).

    FIGURE 8 . The typed epigraph. In an earlier version, Clemens had deleted the title “A Text For All Biographies,” and added, “I will construct a text”; here he inserted “to precede the Autobiography; also a Preface, to follow said Text” and “(which are but the mute articulation of his
feelings
.)” He placed the page after “THE FINAL (& RIGHT) PLAN,” where it was transcribed in TS4. Clemens wrote “All usable” and “ SMALL TYPE to save space” in the margin. The circled “I” in the top margin may have been written by either Clemens or Paine. The other writing on the page is Paine’s.

    FIGURE 9 . Manuscript page 48,
“PREFACE
. As from the Grave.” This page and the three that follow were first numbered 1–4. When Clemens inserted them into the sequence after page 47, he renumbered them 48–51. He moved the page originally numbered 48, containing “Here begin the Florentine Dictations,” to the end and renumbered it 52 ( figure 13 ).

    FIGURE 10 . Manuscript page 49, the second page of “As from the Grave,” first numbered 2 and later changed to 49. Clemens initially ended the preface at the bottom of this page, then canceled his signature and added two more sections.

    FIGURE 11 . Manuscript page 50, section II of “As from the Grave,” which Clemens first numbered 3 and later changed to 50.

    FIGURE 12 . Manuscript page 51, section III of “As from the Grave,” which Clemens first numbered 4 and later changed to 51.

    FIGURE 13 . Manuscript page 52, “Here begin the Florentine Dictations,” which Clemens first numbered 48 and later changed to 52 when he inserted the four-page
“PREFACE
. As from the Grave.”

    We now understand why there are often two, three, or even four nearly identical typescripts for the