In the following essay excerpt, Krauth examines the problems and complexities present in Twain's autobiography, including its fragmented form, its merging of fact and fiction, and its telling by both Samuel Clemens and Mark Twain.

"All my books," Twain once confessed, "are autobiographies." To an unusual degree this is true, as he mined his past for his fictions and recorded versions of his present for his travel books. At the same time, from at least 1870 on, he began to write sketches of his life experiences and his family that are more directly autobiographical. The impulse found new impetus in Vienna from 1897-98 and acquired a new mode in Florence in 1904 when he began to dictate (he had tried dictation briefly in 1885). Finally in 1906 he started the series of almost daily dictations that would continue to within a few months of his death. Always self-conscious, always performing versions...