“It really is 400 pages of bile.”

This might make my Christmas list:

Exactly a century after rumours of his death turned out to be entirely accurate, one of Mark Twain’s dying wishes is at last coming true: an extensive, outspoken and revelatory autobiography which he devoted the last decade of his life to writing is finally going to be published.

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.

On the other hand, maybe I’ll wait until the library gets a copy.

According to the story, he insisted on waiting a century so that all his contemporaries would be dead and gone, and unable to read what he says about them. Which is…courteous, in a sneaky, vile kind of way. I suppose.

by the time anybody reads it. Plus, y’know, it keeps his name in the headlines.

Via Memeorandum.