SOURCE: "Killing Time With Mark Twain's Autobiographies," in ELH, Vol. 54, No. 1, Spring, 1987, pp. 157-82.

In the following essay, Renza discusses various critical responses to the random and repetitious presentation of events in Mark Twain's Autobiography and Life on the Mississippi.

Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.

—Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

I

Not unexpectedly, Mark Twain's autobiographical writings still provoke critical tall tales. It is well known by now that in his 1924 edition of approximately half of Twain's extant autobiographical papers, Albert Bigelow Paine followed Twain's directive in printing them in the exact sequence of their composition.¹ The result is also well known. Twain's Autobiography renders events in a "casual and repetitious and disorderly" manner (Carl Van Doren); Paine's omission of...