Praise for Volumes 1 and 2

“A garrulous outpouring—and every word beguiles.”—Wall Street Journal

“It feels like a form of time travel. One moment you’re on horseback in the Hawaiian islands—or recovering from saddle boils with a cigar in your mouth—and the next moment you’re meeting the Viennese maid he called, in a private joke, ‘Wuthering Heights.’”—New York Times

"Contains more of Twain’s ranging, astute, and unfailingly candid portrayals of his private and public lives. Excoriations of politicians appear next to affectionate family stories and bemused observations on the absurdities of life, helping to fill out our understanding of America’s greatest humorist."—The New Yorker

“I start reading Twain’s Autobiography at any page and don’t want to stop, for the sheer voluptuous pleasure of the prose.”—Roger Ebert

"Twain is incapable of going more than a few paragraphs without making you laugh or think hard. . . . Don't loan this book out: you'll never see it again."—Bloomberg Pursuits

"Brings us closer to all of him than we have ever come before.”—New York Review of Books

“Twain generously provides the twenty-first-century aficionado a marvelous read. His crystalline humor and expansive range are a continuous source of delight and awe. . . . [He] has given us ‘an astonishment’ in his autobiography with his final, beautifully unorganized genius and intemperate thoughts. Pull up a chair and revel.”—Los Angeles Times

“What we have here amounts to the contents of Mark Twain’s attic: all the stuff that didn’t fit in the living quarters and that the man tossed upstairs, where for a century it gathered dust, cobwebs, and rumors.”—Michael Lewis, The New Republic

“For our grasp of Mark Twain—for our belief, ever since he burst on the scene in 1865, that we know him through his prose—the book is a gift and a treasure.“—The American Spectator

“The merit of the autobiography is its revelation of every facet of Samuel Clemens—how modern a figure he is, and how topical his concerns. Take the polemical verve of Christopher Hitchens. Toss in the fun-poking news instincts of the American broadcaster Jon Stewart. Add the traveler's curiosity and gentle wit of a Bill Bryson, plus the raw energy of Ernest Hemingway, and then stir in an entire Oxford dictionary of aphorisms, and you start to get an approximation of a man who spanned virtually every literary genre—and in the process became one of the most quoted (and misquoted) writers to walk the earth.”—The Independent

"One sees a mind bubbling and hears a uniquely American voice."—Literary Review

"Twain traveled extensively and befriended many luminaries, and his colorful experiences give the book the same Dickensian scope as the first volume and present a vivid picture of America in the nineteenth century and Twain’s indelible mark on it."—Publishers Weekly

"In case you had any doubt about it, the new book demonstrates that Twain dictated as well as he wrote."—The Washington Post

"Volume 2 is another masterpiece of scholarship."—Mark Twain Forum

"If you surrender yourself to the sound of his voice, the pleasure of Twain’s company proves pretty hard to resist."—The New Yorker

"The great American author, aided by his scholarly editors, continues to spin out a great yarn covering his long life. . . . Twain admirers will find this volume indispensable and will eagerly await the third volume."—Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review

"This is vintage Twain—timeless, and still germane."—BookPage

"Set aside all ideas of starting at the beginning and reading through to the end. This is a book to keep on your bedside table, or in the kitchen, or the garage, or anyplace else you might want to pick it up. Follow Clemens' own advice in reading it, as he did in writing it: Start reading at no particular point; wander at your free will all over it; read only about the thing that interests you for the moment; drop it the moment its interest threatens to pale; and turn your eye upon the new and more interesting thing that has intruded itself into your gaze meantime. Believe me, there are plenty of these in this wonderful volume."—The Hartford Courant