I started this year of columns with a piece on Mark Twain. It’s fitting that the year should end with another dip into his bottomless well.

One of the landmark literary events of 2010 was the publication of the first volume of Twain’s autobiography, which had been held back at the author’s request for one hundred years following his death.

In the Internet Age, gossip loses news-worthiness in a hundred minutes, much less a hundred years. Speed is to today’s publishers what quality was a few generations ago. Books come roaring to press in the hope that print and digital editions will outpace the inevitable bloggers and leakers.

Despite the proliferation of media venues where “guests” – celebrities and ordinary Joes alike –are expected to make titillating public disclosures, there’s still a huge appetite in the land for the confessional memoir. One of the fastest tracks to fame – and its cooler and often more lucrative sibling, notoriety – is to hire a ghost writer and dish the dirt. “Tell-all” stories are no longer the sole province of tabloids. Even politicians, some of the last people whose lives you’d want to read, see the autobiography as a delivery system for their “brand,” a way to put a positive spin on potentially damaging episodes from their past.

This is yet another way the distinction between “celebrity” and “politician” has utterly collapsed, to the detriment of civic life.

The idea of withholding a memoir would seem crazy to one of today’s compulsive autobiographers. Why be coy when you can write your life story — not once, but several times — and cash in on a hot publishing trend?

Mark Twain’s world was very different from ours in many respects, but even in 1910, the year he died, publishing was big business. Publishers faced the same pressure, then as now, to find the next best-seller. Twain was one of the biggest stars of his day. Surely he knew his autobiography would be a cash cow. He also knew exactly what a celebrity blockbuster looked like: he’d been instrumental in helping his friend and personal hero Ulysses S. Grant bring out an autobiography that was one of the great publishing successes of its day.

But Twain was scrupulous in the management of his image. In this, as in so many other things, he was a man ahead of his time. He worried that publishing negative opinions of contemporaries would do serious harm to their reputations and upset their relatives. No doubt he also considered the damage his unfettered tongue might do to his own carefully burnished persona.

Whatever the reason, Twain made his hundred-year stipulation, and it stuck. And in yet another sign of his inexhaustible genius, the decision to withhold the autobiography for a century was one of the greatest marketing coups in publishing history. How else can you explain the book’s astonishing success, which was such a surprise even to the publisher, the University of California Press? The original print run was planned to be 7,500. According to the Christian Science Monitor, the current total press run of 275,000 is looking “way too small.”

Readers often look for things that happened in an author’s life to help explain a piece of fiction. Of course novelists draw from their own lives, but storytelling is powered by imagination, above all, with its capacity to reshape experience and memory, and to invent from whole cloth, where needed.

Twain was one of literature’s great inventors. His greatest creation, Huck Finn, was an inventor, too, a boy whose incandescent ability to lie about himself was both a survival skill and an essential character trait, something he could no more control than his hatred of bathing.

I’m looking forward to starting 2011 with Twain’s autobiography. Everyone knows that an autobiography is a thoughtful and truthful accounting of a life, the story of a person’s inner world, and how that inner world intersected with a specific time and a place.

Of course, Mark Twain made a career of skewering what “everyone knows.” Anyone looking for a linear recitation of people, places, and events would be wise to look elsewhere.

And speaking of “truthful accounting,” let’s not forget that “Mark Twain” was a creation of Samuel Clemens. At the end of a long and productive career, Mr. Clemens knew for a fact there was no better target for his pen than Mark Twain, that famous curmudgeon posing for photographs in his immaculate white suits.

The old man was completely full of himself. He’d become a tiresome celebrity.

In other words, he was ripe for the plucking.

This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 30 December 2010

For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com