entered the vocabulary that's how it came to be. >> [inaudible] teacher stowe wrote uncle tom's cabin there is a little store called uncle tom's market so if you ever go there it is there and i am sure a lot of people are surprised when you see like why is this year? it's because that's where we rode the books to read estimate that is where a lot of us will be there for the 200th anniversary at the conference.

>> i wonder if you can get a brief time line so that we have more of a context when she wrote the book but other things happened like the fugitive slave act, the dred scott decision john brown was causing havoc and so forth. estimate what happened in 1850's the fugitive slave law which is a closely for a lot because the fugitive slaves when they come to the north if you and capture them and held turn them into the south it is jail and a fine which back then was a lot of money, and it is a really bad thing. she got really mad about that. her sister-in-law you know once you go back and write a novel she says you know i'm going to come and she did.

and but then what happens however is there are a series of other laws after that. the kansas nebraska act, the dred scott decision which says african-americans can never be free in the united states they have no rights whatsoever and she got not just angry but very honest, very bitter and when she writes her novel another antislavery novel appears a little bit later it's a much more bitter novel about a slave rebel who is in front of denmark who had led a slave rebellion. now even though he dies before he can launch the rebellion he still expresses a sort of growing bitterness about what

was happening. what was happening is that the slavery was becoming more and more deeply entrenched to try to pretend that. but unfortunately, it makes slavery more entrenched because its defensive about slavery even as you turn the march towards antislavery. so it has this affected and startles her and becomes more bitter about it and sends petitions to politicians and sends her novel and was good friends of the antislavery politicians and mentioned in political speeches but it was a division so finally when john comes around even though she had created a gentle kunkel tom she

calls john brennan 1859 the greatest american that has ever lived like to former pacifists who had written the classic essays called civil disobedience which influences martin luther king and john brown is greater than any of the other founding fathers and. beecher stowe says no man has ever lived more for the honor of the american indian john brown and yet nobody is violence in the book and in her purse ferry but by that time she knew the sad truth america learned that only violence was going to end slavery and it took the depth of more than 620,000 americans to

end slavery. that is a deeply entrenched the slavery had become in america. and sadly, she came to realize that. she realized that the approach as attractive as it was and as effective as it became she could not predict that but at that moment unfortunately violence was needed to get rid of the slavery and she came to admit that. >> a little while before, you had said that uncle tom's cabin was primarily a firming humanity, and then you mentioned the mosul tread which was a more violent aspect, and you could say that over the long run it

was the affirming humanity that more not even if it took the violence to catalyze or create the immediate change, but i think that for me particularly reading uncle tom's cabin is the affirmative parts of it, the humanization of the slaves of uncle tom and eliza crossing the river that compound of the justice with the affirmative parts of their personality that created the power of eight. i get your point that it might take violence, but when you can step back over 100 years and

look at it, you realize the stronger power of the affirmative affirmation of humanity. >> on p.m. and the eternal optimist. i happen to be a pacifist myself what is unusual about uncle tom is that there are not that many novels you can read but they're both powerful and very dramatic and exciting and when uncle tom gets them and get their affirmative. there are so many characters that basically even a few of the slave holders are fundamentally

good people ironically enough and that is what is great about the novel. she doesn't demonize even all the slave holders and there is a subtlety in her portrayal that does try to look for the good. as i say i am a optimist that happens to believe and the human difference and basic human goodness and maybe i read it too much ralph waldo emerson. maybe that's it. i like to see the good in people and to me that is another appealing thing about there's very few characters and some of them agree he's sort of

april 1st character. there are certain characters that are bad guys but what i love about the novel, too, is the you can read it and feel uplifted. you can feel uplifted, and i like -- it's kind of like i don't like quarter movies or bloody movies to read and i like uncle tom's cabin because for me it is uplifting and i think someone like rosa parks and like martin luther king does win. i think those people do when in the end and so i stand on the side beebee i am a blind optimist i stand on the side of hope and goodness. what can i say.

there isn't really that too much by the time she wrote in 1856 she was a little more bitter, a real difficulty in the kind of moral goodness in any single character and i loved and dread and i did is a good novel and it's wonderful but it doesn't really moved me into the sense of hope the way that uncle tom's cabin does. thank you for bringing that up. >> i just wanted to know. i don't know how far your biography goes if you encountered the stage play iowa and your uncle, which we as i guess had the good fortune of having it's been a lot 15 years

that critiques uncle tom's cabin very provocative i felt more actually should have been targeted at the stage play rather than at stowe's novel was kind of my ultimate idea that they were brochard and left of the stage productions and i just wondered if you encounter it and what you saw it. >> it comes out first think in the late 1980's. i enjoyed it a lot. i can say all kinds of things about that, but all these transformations and answers to uncle tom's cabin over time i discussed at in my books and

that's kind of a radical, not radical but very forceful critique and i believe perhaps because one of the characters and not play very interestingly so. i think this is the evolution of the characters in a way that becomes today the kind of rap singer or modern pop rebellious black control speak smart rebeling against. there are so many characters in an awful it becomes transformed over time and bounce off uncle tom's cabin things we act against and to me that is one of the more interesting responses,

modern responses to uncle tom's cabin but it's very much responding to some along the way which is very understandable. >> that was a play by robert alexander, 1995 - to -- i think. one of the most interesting things about uncle tom's cabin is what continues to be a touchstone for modern life i got a note the other day from the cabin. [laughter] i'd been waiting for this tried as a reading in washington, d.c. we will see what happens there. always another opportunity. >> in my book i have a lot of

things about 20 a century. in the chinese entry into the cabin hits the book stands. it's printed go everywhere. walt disney cartoons, cartoons are based on that and people see advertising. if you read my book you will see all of that. >> the cartoon you mentioned in which one of the lines was we love black people what was the date or the period of that cartoon and was that the language of that time? >> it was produced in my book but it's a political cartoon and it really wanted to show what a

uncle tom's cabin was going to creative people to get seriously that is the new title of the novel you will see them there but that was the view of the self of the political cartoon. estimate and that is the language that they used? >> yes. i think it is precisely. >> yes, hello. i would like to say that i do believe that the true for every human being is to be good. i don't think it is an unreasonable expectation and i would like to revisit this question earlier about uncle tom, the usage of the phrase uncle tom and in - we certainly

still think that it happens today we're as human beings i think we are sensitive. i think that, you know, we do judgment with our research and that we are just human beings. and i would say that it reminds me of for example when there was a vermont to be your company that had a straight jacket on for valentine's one year and i wanted one and so the controversy was that people that were schizophrenia or bipolar felt it was an unsold and i just felt differently, i felt disbanded about it but the start producing it because of that and i felt that another example was malcolm x. many people upon that research or studying his life still think that he was a radical crazy person and that he hated all white people and he went through

the revolution and changed that and so i think the fact that being uncle tom was negative and it wasn't based on the book but all this and everyone believed that and i want to make that point. bringing her back to the present i had to kind of hope she didn't end up feeling like you have to have violence to change, to stop slavery because i think that human beings as we were saying earlier the public opinion changes, government changes and again, our cable board during the cuban revolution at some point in that we shouldn't expect protest the death and violence, we shouldn't expect that and the truth is the slavery has not ended.

it's gone underground with human trafficking and so many different things you can put into that box and outside the box. so i would hope that if heriot were here today she would be working on these other issues and what's going on under the current talking in public, voting. >> we talked about uncle tom's cabin and we also talked about the book i think that's a threat. i was wondering what other writings did she have and what were these themes and plots and issues that she had in those writings? >> she didn't return to the

slavery issue, not to charge too much except for the certain decisions and hold the republican party because there's the response to uncle tom's cabin and the enslaved black person would be cut off and such a violent reaction against she did her best for the antislavery but after that, she writes around 30 novels, and many of them are very, very good novels, great novels, but mainly about her new england fema, new

england history, some of them were children's stories. most of them, however, shy away from -- she wrote a book about leedy and she wrote some controversial issues and she tried in her own way to help but when she moved to florida but apart from the winter she helped to found with her husband a school that was semi integrated, close to being integrated that it would become in that today one room for white children and one for black and she remained a hero among african-americans, but she shies away and from that kind of thing she tries to focus

more on history manners and so forth and she does a marvelous job. >> was it her first book? >> her first novel. she had written magazine pieces before that. >> i want to recognize david commenting that we are joined by john headrick. thank you for being here tonight. and other friends and colleagues and scholars and historians. thank you all for being here. be sure to spend a few minutes and get your copy of david runnels wonderful new book mightier than the sword and every read uncle tom's cabin or read it for the first time and find out why it is a book that

still resonates in the united states of america today. thank you very much, david. we appreciate having you. [applause] >> thanks very much. >> she talks about her book the woman behind little women. this took place at the boston public library and it's a little more than an hour. >> hello tenet i'm very happy to be here and see you all in boston where i've lived for over 30 years and where louisa considered her home town. i know she is associated with concord but actually she spent her first seven years here as a little girl. she found in the pond and was rescued, she ran away in little

shoes at about four she wanted to show them to the soldiers and she explored the city. she played with little children and whenever she could as she grew up she came back to boston and wanted to spend some time. in her book she describes it in the number of times with great affection and not great affection for concord by the i think as an older woman living alone in concord it wasn't a great place for a single woman. is this better? okay. taking care of her family where she was an independent soul in boston. as marcus said i did get interested through my mother who gave me the reason i got of the little women book and i became my interest partly because my mother did and she liked to talk

about louisa's life and that it was much more sanaa than the little women's lives and when i can to the area of california that i had been living one of the first things i did was to go to the orchard house where she lived at the time she wrote little women. she wrote most of it there but she actually finished it here in of the bellevue hotel across from the state house. not many people know that actually. but when i went to the orchard house and saw the desk she wrote little women at which is no bigger of an area than this. it's probably smaller. it's a half circle about this diameter and just run for the little piece of paper and her father built this for between the two windows and orchard house and i just kind of felt taken by her she seemed to rise

and i just felt such a connection with her and started to read whatever i could because at that time the journals or been published for the first time, letters published for the first time, some of the thrillers. she had a secret literary life as the right of perfection and some of them were coming out and i was working at webh and so i was always talking to my friend and colleague who is here in the front row and directing the film we need to get there because when i went to her and i said -- she said let's make a film would be like judy garland. so some 20 years later we completed this film that will be seen on american masters on december 28 at 9 p.m. and you will see a little bit of it here because i felt a big way to introduce louisa is to just show the opening clip of our film and you will see what a complex

woman she was and how many aspects she had to her life and then we can talk about look -- books. i wanted to write a book about louisa may alcott for a very long time but frankly i didn't have the credentials at that point. but when we started doing the film i had read everything she broke and she wrote over 200 works. if you count each story it comes out to about 600 works and there hadn't been a biography written in 30 years so nancy and i have the freedom to make our own interpretation of louisa. very often -- and nancy has made a lot of films for public television and you find a recent biographer and that person in forms the whole thing. should we start with this now, nancy?

>> i hope so. >> okay. ♪ >> funding for this program has been provided by the national endowment for the humanities because democracy [inaudible] ♪ >> i scrambled up to a childhood and sell with a crash into girlhood and continued falling out of trees, over fences, up hill and down stairs, tumbling into the topsy-turvy growth turned into the topsy-turvy woman. estimate for many years people believed that louisa may alcott was just a writer of children's books. but people discovered she was deeply interested in the darker

side of the human character in the motions. >> i enjoyed writing pretty young. i do it because it pays well. >> the poetry, short stories she published over to dozen books but she became famous as the author of little women to its spoken across cultures and generations and translated into over six languages, television, movie adaptations. >> musicals, operas, ballet, anime and a lot of merchandise. estimate after louisa died, her sister adopted to write louisa's official biography. >> louisa may alcott's works are a revelation of her life. it's impossible to understand them without knowing her life

story. fortunately i can let her speak for herself. summit in her biography, she made louisa may alcott has an uncomplicated figure. >> but as we go deeper into the other stories that she wrote and the facts of her life, she was an immensely complex woman. >> when you think it'll hurt perils to discipline oneself to get a sense of the writer herself. >> i have lots of troubles so i write jolie tales. ♪

.. i acquired the credentials partly because i read it all and they wrote the script, and we had all the top scholars in all caught studies to drop on because they were the advisory board for the film, and just because of the film the interest was there and we were able to

get this biography off the ground. and i actually feel i have a real advantage first of all not having that approach and having the approach of a filmmaker, having to figure out what these people war and eight and working in orchard houses. i became very familiar with it, and in fruit lands and other places that she lived in it emerson's house. for one example louisa was a runner. she was running but people don't know that. she ran nearly every day. she even writes at one point that she ran 20 miles. so we had to figure out what did she wear when she was running and how did she wear it? so that was the kind of detail that gave me a very strong sense of her material reality and i guess i would have to say if i had any goal in the film it was to make you see a living, breathing woman who if you are at a dinner party, if she sat at the table with you, you might not guess came from another

century because she was a very modern woman, very open-minded. she had radical views on abolition for instance, which her family was very active and women's rights, and women's right to vote, and she threw herself into the struggles. she grew up as the daughter of ronson olcott who was a philosopher educator and was not a great knack for earning a living. he had a school here in boston a temple temple school that was very advanced. he embedded recess. this is montessori type teaching or syncretic teaching really is what he did in an era when it was all rote memorization. he made his classroom very beautiful and comfortable when kids were used to sitting on hard benches with no backs and he really respected children. he thought people should listen to what they had to say.

he actually flirted with sex education it was said, it was alleged. book was written about his classroom and conversations, literal conversations, wonderful as a biographer to have the actual text of what this student said in what he said in the classroom. and in this -- it was felt that he was becoming very close to sex education in the newspapers kind of race to scandal and he lost most of his pupils. then to top it off, he admitted a little black girl into his class so this this was 1837. this is 25 years before antislavery. there were moms in boston among them william garrison not long before. he was a very gutsy guy but after that he was totally unemployable as a teacher. usually his principals made it impossible for him to earn a living as anything else. he became a socialist and he was

not going to work for wages. people wanted to give him money that was fine. they lived on handouts and she was extremely poor. she grew up very very poor. if you read little women you know in the march family they lived in gentile poverty. they have a servant even. hannah her name is. well, the alcott's lipton grueling poverty and subsisted on bread and water diets for long periods of time. sometimes they would have an apple with their water and with their bread and water. she vowed that she was going to rescue her family from poverty and she did. she became a multimillionaire eventually with "little women" and the other book she wrote which is very difficult to do and buried difficult to live -- make your living as a writer then are now. that was her achievement and that was really what she wanted do with her life from a young

age, from about the age of nine or 10 and he read about it in his book worried you see why she's doing it and she makes a statement in her journal that she says i wish i was rich, i was good and we are all a happy family this day. so she set out to make that come true. well, i think i should go move up about -- let's see. she was really homeschooled actually. her father's best friends were ralph waldo emerson and henry david thoreau so emerson totter about literature in a row talker about nature and she went on a walk with thoreau. those famous nature walks, and she could drop into emerson's library any time. and just ask them what she thought he should read. she had a front row seat to what was happening, to the most important movements all through her life. she knew all of the abolitionist. she knew frederick douglass and

harriet tubman and john brown, so her story is really fascinating and i tried to put in the context of her time. their early years, she was really living in that transcendental world, and she kind of came out of it fiercely practical because she saw just how much they suffered from her father's idealism. and then came the civil war, and they had been abolitionist and childhood. they were on the freedome -- what is it called? the underground railway. she has several anecdotes about teaching one man to write his name and various other parts of the abolition movement. so, when civil war broke out, the abolitionists were very glad. they thought it was a great day and a big question was going to be settled. but of course she couldn't join the army.

she would have if she could have, and she decided instead to become a nurse. so when she turned 30, she enlisted in the sanitary commission it was called, and she had no nursing training whatsoever. no one had nursing training. she had carried cups of tea up to her sister who had died at the bedside in "little women." her sister died a few years before. so i want to read to you part of the book about her service as a nurse, and urban army nurse and at this point, she has come into this union hospital in georgetown near washington. the farthest he has ever been away from home alone and within days she is thrust into the situation of assisting in amputations without the benefit of ether. so, this was a very terrible time. it was at the time of the battle of fredericksburg in the georgetown hospital was about a mile behind the lines.

she could see the canon fire when she went on her runs in the mornings. she was there, and there is a figure of something like 10,000 wounded at the battle of fredericksburg. so she was always trying to take care of about three or 400 men have managed to make it to the hospital to

can you gimme? louisa liked being part of what she called the ninth side of life, to be up only when sleep and death have the house themselves. the hospital may turn them mired lewis and gave the responsibility of assigning the patients in a three room or to the appropriate corridors according to their condition. the tv room held the newly one day. the pleasure room was were recovering soldiers, whom louisa entertained with gains gossips and probably the imitation from

dickens martin chuzzlewit that had been lizzie's a delight. the pathetic room, hopeless cases was a place to bring teapots, lullabies, consolation and sometimes a shrub. the sleeping men often broke the night silence of award talking, making all kinds of noise. the graph and radisson soldier by day became mild and chatty and sleep at night. a drummer boy sang sweetly. sometimes louisa looked out the window at the moonlit church fire across the way at the passersby on the street and a boat gliding down the potomac river. all that river water could not wash off the blood stains on the land she thought, but what had been washed away was louisa's naïveté about the excitement and glory of fighting righteous battles. one night she found herself alone at the bedside of the new jersey man reliving the recent horrors of battle. he cheered on or cried out fallen comrades, ducked incoming

shots and grabbed louisa's arm briefly to pull her away from imaginary bursting shells. the man's ravings are pitiful to hear an impossible to restrain. in the meantime the fever wracked one leg at soldier propelled himself to the war like a ghost. telling louisa that he was dancing home, crashing into bed and threatening harm to everyone and to himself and everybody else with no orderly there. louisa was helpless to contain two sadly unhinged men and the situation deteriorated even more when solving broke out from a 12-year-old-year-old drummer boy in his bed. the boys love lament was for the death of the wind is soldiers that carried him to safety. it matured her and replaced her book knowledge of behavior under duress with real-life experience. for all their liberality, her parents notions of human character were just that, notions. they were ideally come ideal is especially her father but also her mother who didn't see people for who they were so much as for

how far they tell short of what they should be. louisa wanted to know life and knowledge trooper idea and she was getting the chance. john suri was a virginia blacksmith, big strong man of 30. her own age, with a small but indisputably biddle glint in his back that he could not see and had to lie upon in order to breathe. he sat propped up in a bed that had been extended to accommodate his outsized frame, looking around with serenity, never making a request dori complained. when he slept, and louisa spent several nights watching him sleep, a tender smile played around his mouth like a woman she thought. when he was awake louisa was a little afraid of the man. unsure how to respond to his manly strength and dignity she hung back, thinking she wasn't needed or wanted. from her at myron description and hospital sketches the book louisa created from her letters home, it is obviously that she

loves john suri but whether what they worshipers are, and woman's desire or a mother's devotion is hard to discern. amongst attractive face he had she says fossil an awful beautifully mild while watching the afflictions of others as if entirely forgetful of his own. she described his eyes as a child sized with the clearest straightforward glance. he seemed to cling to life is it as if it were rich and delightful and he had learned the secret of content. she asked the doctor which man in her ward separate the most and was shocked to hear john because he was so strong that dr. predicted a long and painful death. there is not the slightest hope for him and you had better tell him so before long he instructed. women have a way of doing such things comfortably so i leave it to you. charge with this awesome responsibility, louisa stayed close by as the doctor carelessly dressed the terrible would. for the first time she saw tears

slipping down john street. it is silent and during of pain and his terrible loneliness. straightway my fear banished, my heart open wide and took him in as gathering the bench had in my arms as freely as if he had been a little child. i said, let me help you bury john. never on any human countenance have i seen so swift and beautiful a look of gratitude, surprising comfort is that which answered me more eloquently than the whispered thank you maam, this is right good. this is what i wanted. the next time his wounds were dressed, louisa held john and he squeezed her hand to relieve his pain. when the ordeal was done, she eased him back against the pillows, cleansed his face, smoothed his brown hair and spent a full hour by his bedside. when she said to arrange astray and his sheets she felt his hand braise her skirt. another day she put a sprig of heliotrope on his pillow. finally he said, this is my

first battle. do they think it is going to be my last? i'm afraid they do, john. it was the hardest question i had ever been called upon to answer, doubly hard with those clear eyes fixed on mine forcing a truthful answer by their own truth. to the anti-help hand clothes, so close that when he was asleep at last, i could not dry the way. dam, the orderly, helped me. warning as he did so that it was unsafe for dead and living flesh to lie so long together. by hand was strangely cold and stiff and for white arts remained across his back, even when warmth and color had returned elsewhere. she helped prepare john's body for burial, removing the wedding ring his widowed mother had given him to wear in battle and cutting a few locks of his hair to enclose when he sent the ring home to virginia. a last letter from his family arrived at the hospital an hour before his death but was not

brought until an hour after it. louisa plays placed the unread letter in the callused hand to bury with him as a signifier of loved ones at his bedside. louisa had always considered herself immune to illness. when she developed a bad cough, she continued her daily runs in the dead of winter. despite the warnings that she risked an ammonia. after three weeks of nonstop rounds, bad food, feathered air and constant exposure to infection, louisa's fierce physical defenses gave way to typhoid pneumonia. a staff dr. pounder on a staircase too dizzy to stand, coughing uncontrollably. her forehead so hot she was trying to cool it on an iron banister. when the doctor ordered her to bed, she didn't argue. the sharp pain in the side, coffee brand dizziness have a

pleasant prospect for a lonely soul 500 miles from home she commented, expect the neglect. and nurses assented to her room to lavish her with the same tenderness she showed their patients. dale attended she knew from long nights on the board capture would talk full and a succession of doctors brought her calla mail. the mercury content that was used to treat just about everything. she revived her opinion of their sharply upward. least understood their concerns. the matron had also been diagnosed with typhoid pneumonia and was not expected to survive. amid bouts of fever is dilution and constant pain, louisa tried to keep mary by writing letters home but felt worse every day. ours began to get confuse. people looked odd. faces out of on to the brim room and the nights were one long fight with weariness and pain. time she was incoherent even in sleep and she never lost sight

of the peril she was in. dream awfully and awaken refreshed, think of home and wonder if i am to die here as mrs. rhodes is likely to do. before collapsing, mrs. robes wondered the same thing about her. she sent they all can't's an urgent telegram asking someone come immediately to take louisa home. she had served for six weeks. bronson, her father, left that same day on the noon train to boston and traveled straight through to washington to arrive on january 16. louisa determined to serve out her three-month stint, had rejected every suggestion that she go home. her father's appearance made real her grave condition and the impact on her family if she were to die. the room with swarming with people making recommendations. one of them was dorothy dix, who wanted lisa take into her own quarters for personal care. louisa wanted to stay where she was. bronson doubted that his daughter could regain either strength or spirit in washington

that the doctors felt she was not strong enough to travel. restless and anxious, but for bid in tuesday at his daughter's bedside, bronson made the rounds of louisa's patience and was disabuse up disabused of any romantic ideas about the struggle. the horrid war he wrote in his journal and one sees a tour in hospitals if anywhere. on the 19th, he visited the senate and finding a seed air president lincoln, studied his face at close range and found him only are than the papers and portraits had shown him. and his manner impressive. i was to have had an interview, but i'm too anxious about louisa and without time to see kids. on the 20th of january mrs. robes died. the next they louisa agree to let her father take her home. so, that is part of her experience. you might've recognized the name

dorothea dix and there. she founded the sanitation committee which was the forerunner of the red cross, and she also was very active in prison reform and reform of institutions for the mentally ill. she actually served bronson as a teaching assistant way that. he had very distinguished teaching assistant. he had margaret fuller, you may have heard of, woman from the 19th century was his assistance and sophia peabody hawthorne was a talented artist and her sister elizabeth peabody all worked with bronson at the temple school. it died out because of the scandals. what else do i want to tell you cut there is so much to say. [inaudible] either you didn't know before, something that was like oh, really caught you by surprise

they you were not expecting? >> well, that she was a runner kind of surprised me. that i knew that she had written these trailers, but some of her religious ideas at the end of her life she said she believed in reincarnation. and when you look back on some of her other writings, you can see she is saying, think i was a horse in some form or stay. i love to move so much. i found her very admirable. she really stuck it out with her family. i was surprised how talented she was as an actress and how serious she was about acting. she was really a professional level actress, and performed in the amateur stage a great deal. after she became famous she was asked to perform this impression of mrs. george lee from dickens a hop in a kind of character who works at a wax museum and is very pretentious and funny. she would perform an raise

thousands of dollars. she would have liked to have got into the theater. like henry james she wrote a number of place but things didn't get off the ground, and there is some thought that she may have actually performed as an actress professionally. but it hasn't been proved. there is a little intriguing piece of data that indicate she may have. she worked at every job. i didn't really know how hard things were for her. she worked at every job that was available to women of her time. among them, she was a seamstress. she actually likes selling more than the others because it gave her time to think of her stories and write them down on sunday's. another surprising thing i thought about -- i thought about her was she was always telling herself stories. she had 12 stories going on in her have that she was working out. she worked as a laundress, which is the lowest job and to think about what you have to do to do laundry and that period.

they could fire, boil water and a heavy tub and stand over a steaming cauldron. so she did that. she was a governess. she hated teaching. she really disliked it. she didn't have the patience for it, and she also worked as a household servant. and wrote a story about it, and she was really sexually harassed with this experience. so, we thought that you would like to see what we did about the civil war which is the same piece that i wrote about and i should mention first that the script of the film is all first-person dialogue. everything anybody says is something that they wrote and it is in their journals and letters. emerson, everybody, bronson, her mother. said the book was an opportunity to tell in my own words what i thought the story was, so i hope you get to see the film because

it is really a different approach to it. >> the only participation in the war that was formally opened to women was a brand-new occupation called nursing. the six dress by gaslight would run through my board and throw open windows as if life life depended on it. a more perfect pestilence box i never saw. now i am often homesick, heartsick and worn-out. i like it. she arrived in the evening of one of the bloodiest battles of the civil war. in a battle of fredericksburg i have seen once it's not 10,000 wounded and maybe as many killed. was a debacle over several days.

>> stretchers with legless, armless entering my ward. ♪ the surgeons began the amputations. dr. paige seem to regard page seem to regard it dilapidated -- e. there was not thought necessary. with all its hardships, ms. alcott found in the hospital that buried in intense human life she had longed to know. >> john surry, the prince of patience. no dying statements was ever

fuller of real dignity than this virginia blacksmith. >> do you think i will pull through? >> i hope so. there is not the slightest hope. you have got to tell him. i will leave it to you. >> she writes his last letter for him to his mother and everyone in the ward weeps. that may help you bury john. >> this is right good. this is my first battle. and i think it is going to be my last. >> i'm afraid they do, john. >> she writes about him and one gets the sense of yearning, but it cannot be.

to the end he held my hand so close, i couldn't draw it away. it was unsafe for dead and living flesh to lie so close together. a hand was strangely and stiff, and for white marks remained across its back. >> only weeks after being there she contracted typhoid fever. louisa was treated with cala mail, which is a form of mercury. it was used for tuberculosis, typhoid, melancholia and oppression. they threw it at everything that they could. >> lie still my dear. >> we may be thankful she is away from that infected place. it is fortunate i went for her.

she lift up separate handsome woman and returned to return to us a rack of body and mind. i will never forget the strange fancies that haunted me. i had married a handsome spaniard with very soft hands continually saying, lie still my dear and threatening me all night long. a mob at all to more breaking down the door to get me. being hung for a which. burned, as don, maltreated. i join dr. winslow in in the end the two nurses worshiping the devil.

tending to millions of sick men who never died or got well. i thought that would be an interesting demonstration of how you treat an incident in different media. i wanted to say actually that the book was based on the work and knowledge from scholars and, but we found something that actually are new, that were news. one of the things that is in the book is we cracked the mystery of what louisa died from. are rather these two british doctors. you saw one of them in that shot very briefly. louisa thought she died from mercury poisoning, but a couple of english doctors went through all of her journals and wrote down all of her complaints and her symptoms that she had, and

concluded that it wouldn't be mercury poisoning. and they went through it and came down to six categories. one possibility was that she had six different ailments, each of which explained a set of symptoms but it more likely answer would have been an autoimmune disease. and they rejected syphilis. just didn't seem too likely in louisa's case and they wondered about lupus. lupus is very difficult to diagnose, even today. this doctor went to this orchard house and an orchard house is a very realistic painting of louisa painted by an artist, george healey, who was rubber guarded to the president daniel hawthorne. it was a marker for standing at that point that she was painted by him and he asked her to paint her. he looked at the portrait and on

her cheeks she saw this rash. it was called a butterfly rash. that is a characteristic rash that can indicate lupus and it did come out after she had been in the sun for a few days. they went back to the journal and sure enough she had been in northern italy in the sun for a few days, and this rash, we know it is a very realistic painter so it had been there. she had complained about the portrait. she said it should be hung behind the door. and she said, her cheeks were as red as the chairs he sat and. it look like she died of lupus. i'm actually glad that she never knew that, because she felt that she had sacrificed her help. she was never that healthy the rest of her life and that she had sacrificed it in very good cause. so sometimes i guess it is better not to know. they couldn't have done too much for her anyway. another question that i had concerned her niece, lulu.

louisa racer needs for the last eight years of her life, and everybody asks me what happened to lulu? well i had a clue. i had read a book called the alcott biography of the family by a woman named madeline citadel. an introduction to that book, she describes going to visit lulu in 1976 in switzerland where lulu is living and is 96 years old, lived only a few more months. interviewing lulu and she is very vivid description of the scene but the interview doesn't appear in the book because it is the first volume of several volumes and louisa makes it to louisa being about 12 years old. and then after that, madeline citadel came down with cancer and died. so i thought, where did that interview go? where her notes? i asked all all the scholars and none of them had thought about it. and i didn't know what to do. i actually got down to calling

the gal in phone books. i see a foam of phone with a call of someone named fidel and asked if they knew of madeline fidel. i was also buying secondhand books about louisa because once i was working with her and falling apart, and at one point i saw another copy of the alcott's either via the family and i pick it up and there is this letter. it is a carbon copy an onionskin of the letter written by madeline patel of herself. district to the travel editor of "the new york times," guy named michael stern who i think later became famous for writing about roadside food. but she was proposing a story about all the places that louisa lived in boston and at the bottom of the letter, is an address in brooklyn. so i called that number and there was madeline patel's woodward 25 years later.

he was going to move a few months later so he would not have been there if i would not have found that at this point. i asked him what happened to the papers. he said that he had given them to the writer who is planning was planning to write a book about louisa's younger sister and lulu's mother. she had not done anything with it. so we took her out to lunch, nancy and i and this writer to lunch and talked her into saying that she would give us the papers he could she was going to be moving anyway soon. and that it would be easier not to have responsibility for the papers which were about the volume of a very big old desk in the darius boxes so she agreed to that. then lima got back to boston nancy and i called her and she did not answer our phonecalls and did not reply to our e-mails. she just disappeared and we were afraid she was going to move and

take the papers with her and they would never be seen again. so actually, we had to do a little campaign actually it took about six months to rest these papers out of her paws. we had gone to her. she was very eccentric and wrote books about victorian decoration. every room had six different wallpapers. it was almost a -- kind of territory. so that was something new that we have in the book and you find out what happened to lulu and some interesting things happen to louisa's fortune after she died. and so that is new information and comes with the epilogue of the book. so, questions? [inaudible] was able to recall louisa clearly and that would give you a sense of what she might've been like at home. >> yes, she did.

she described her aunt anna who was louisa's older sister who was megan "little women" who also helped raise her. it is very interesting portrait of both of them. [inaudible] >> she was in some sort of old-age home and madeline bedell had been discouraged from coming to switzerland because they said lulu didn't remember anything and she would be able to talk but as often happens with old people they have very good recall over their early lives. so it is very intriguing to think it is a little bit of a saw that in itself about lulu. >> i am just very depressed by the richness. i'm hearing things i didn't

hear, don't remember from those other biographies from you and i'm wondering, not just the secrets of lulu which makes me want to run out and -- but did you just focus on different pieces of what was there and create a different kind of a picture of her? i remember one biography was an older one and kind of an old-fashioned thing which almost re-created her and then there was one in the 70s, very feminist. stole yours, i don't know what yours is like. it seems very rich and dramatic with detail but i didn't even know was there from reading the others and was it all there though and the other by devries chose not to presented as you did? >> yes i would say to a great extent. for instance when we were working on the film we thought she ran, what a perfect motive for a film. and, i spoke to some of the advisers that we had, actually the editor of her journals and letters, and they said something.

what do you suppose she wore when she ran? and he said she ran? you know it wasn't something that he had picked up in the journals but if you look in the journals, it is there. when she is writing "little women" she says i have time only to eat, sleep and for daily run and that is all i can do. it is to go for a daily run. and there are many references to running. so i did find -- why did she run? well, a costume designer worked it out and really she wore her regular clothes and flat brown shoes that she would have worn anyway, but she tied up her skirt called a kilt thing, tilting her skirt so they would be tied up. you have seen pictures of this. their petticoats are showing in the top level is kind of hiked up and fastened, more or less around her waist. so, that is what we did in the film and that was to the best of our knowledge and our costume designer really was very conscientious. and did you read about -- you

must have read about fruitland, her father's commune. for lanza was in harvard massachusetts. wench who was about nine, her father founded a utopian community and this was the time of the mennonites and the shakers and there were a lot of these intentional communities springing up. so sober father belt one around himself, and they only grew vegetables for instance they grew up. they wouldn't grow potatoes because they wanted vegetables that aspire to higher visions, you know. stunningly impractical. they wanted to -- they wouldn't wear would wear clothing made of cotton because it was the product of slave labor. they wouldn't wear wool because it was a product of cheap labor. and if they had been able to afford silks, they would not a born at either because you are

destroying the worms with a silk so they were very conscientious and they wore clothing of lenin. and so i talked to the costume designers. these clothes were only very roughly described and they seem to be tunics over bloomers and a man's shirt more or less and for the women like address or bloomers. bloomers actually had not been invented in the sense of we think of them until the bicycle came along and bloomers were invented again. so i asked the costume designer, i think these clothes must have been very simple and they probably cut out one piece in the front like around sleeves and an out lined one-piece the back and so than together on the sides. and she said, oh know they wouldn't have done that. that would have been very expensive and would have been a waste of fabric. they just didn't do that. they would have -- sleeves because you lay out the address

and use less fabric. so it was very interesting to have to work in those terms and come up with something. she based the outfits pretty much on french agricultural workers clothing at the time. and then she went out to california and rented costumes for the found that have been used in the series deadwood on tv a lot. so it was exactly the same same period period of clothing. so there was also in other another biography two years ago called eden's outcast the story of bronson -- and her father by john madison with one of our geysers and is the film. it wasn't reviewed anywhere and i sent him two reviews one from the guardian one from "the cleveland plain dealer." the movie got it bullets or price for his book and it is a very fine book. ahead was focusing on the relationship between bronson alcott and louisa, which

especially they book you mentioned about the feminist one, is a pretty heavy-handed. it is kind of based upon the thrillers and there is a lot of battles over the sexes and thrillers. he seems to be a villain. if you take the book literally, which he did and actually now martha saxton said it went a bit too far in the direction that she took it. excuse me. so madison's book is a much more subtle exploration of her relationship with her father. she was born on her father's birthday when he was 33 and she died two days after he died without knowing that he had died. so they were very closely tied. i go into it in the book, but i didn't center the book as much on it because madison had written this very fine book not long before. but her father was a scientist

really. he recorded his children's activities from the day of birth, so we know what louisa was like at four months old and we know that a two years old she waged a campaign for dominance over her 3 1/2 -year-old sister and one because she took advantage of her when her sister had a cold and had hurt her ankle. so, there is so much material that it is just fascinating. i liked bronson cut's journals which amounted to 52 volumes. so the sources were really rich, and i enjoyed it very much. i like to write journals and letters i would say more than anything else. she wrote very quick and always for money and she never revised and it shows. they are not really carefully perfected. the book that she liked the most was a novel and she worked on it for 20 years off and on.

that his success in my opinion and i think some of the scholars hold it in somewhat high esteem, but i didn't. it is very intriguing because in that there is the heroin and in the alcott character and she is really in love with two men. she marries the man who is exactly like emerson. if you look at a photograph of emerson and read a description of jeffrey moore, it is emerson and then the other man is kind of a man of action like thoreau. showed she describes the row and so it is very intriguing. so, anyway you have a question, jim? >> digit have significant romantic relationships that we know of? >> the question was did she have significant romantic relationships that we know of? well, she decided not to marry. she said she was afraid to try it.

however, she did have flirtations and certainly she had huge crushes on thoreau and emerson winchester teenager and she had a number of friends, friendships with younger men. i think really boehm there was to feel on the same level because a younger man with an older woman would be more equal, wouldn't dominate her. she went to europe as a ladies companion. she wanted to go to europe so much in and while on her trip she met a man named used nevsky, a polish musician who was in exile as chopin was. very much that model of him and she called him laddie. she used him as the basis of the karat gold -- character laurie and the "little women" and that was the character that her public wanted her creation, joe march, her alter ego -- alter ego wanted him to marry laddie.

but she quit her job as a ladies companion and then she went to paris and she spent two weeks in paris in the company of this young man, this was another thing the scholars never thought could be anything, could be a romance. i thought gee two weeks alone unchaperoned? [laughter] you know, in 1865 in paris and talks about these things to her his sweetest airs and you know, and she describes him in a very romantic way. actually she remained in touch with him throughout her lifetime, but when she got back and she wrote about the trip, she wrote one entry that started with the words, a little romance, and then it went on and said a little more, but at a later time she went back to this entry and scratched at whatever words there were. so hard that she went through almost the paper and defaced the

paper. there was no eraser of any other kind in her diary or her journals that are like this. in and and then she wrote over this, couldn't be. so a little romance with laddie couldn't be. so, she had a proposal or two i think. she wrote the shortest dear john letter in history i think. she wrote dear mr. condit, it decided it would be best for me not to accept your proposal, in haste lm alcott. [laughter] but we figured out who mr. condit was. we think he was a manufacture of hats in somerville. maybe it was a little crack or something because they have a lot of mercury in them a king of hats anyway, so she did have suitors. but she said she wanted to be a free sister and paddle her own canoe. but she had all the options in

that canoe. she found it very very hard to pay back all the debts that they owed and it took her years and years to pay them off. she paid her sister spinal doctor bill 10 years after her sister died. it took that long to have enough money to pay it. so, any other questions. >> you have some descriptive excerpts in the book about what she thought of thoreau and emerson and frederick douglass and harriet tubman like you had mentioned after meeting them and talking about them as a person? >> yes, there were some. she doesn't really say anything about harriet tubman. she does describe john brown's widow and daughter who actually came with the alcott after john brown was dead. she talks about sitting between i think mr. and mrs. frederick douglass at a funeral for one of the great abolitionist in boston. she talks about theodore parker,

who was a very well-known clergyman or actually had lost his congregation because of his radical views. she talks about charles sumner. she just worship the ground sumner walked on and you know she will go to a littles for a. theater of parker had won every afternoon and she describes oliver wendell holmes sr. looked up at her and said, i hear you have how many sisters are there? she said for and he said and all his tall as you? a very short man, so she does have a lot of antic notes and descriptions of people. she uses thoreau as a character a number of times and in one of her later books long after thoreau was dead, she brings him out as the favorite writer of the young man and kind of boost him.

thoreau had been forgotten and really emerson and louisa alcott tried to keep him in public view. throughout their lifetimes and eventually he was appreciated, but he died was something like over 700 copies of the week on the merrimack river in his room because he had not sold them. so, he was quite neglected for years. i think there is an essay by thoreau called walking. it is one of the more famous ones, and i swear the companion he is describing on his walk has to be louisa. read it and see if you agree, but just from everything the companion says and what he describes as their conversation, just feels like it must be louisa to me. another question? >> what would you -- what would you say were her biggest regrets? >> her biggest regrets?

i think she purposely did not have regrets. you know, she didn't go back that way. for her comment was always -- there was always a duty to be followed and that was her motive, to go on. i can't think of any regrets. she said no she didn't come even though it cost her her health because she had made that sacrifice. she regretted very much that she couldn't control her temper. her whole life she was very turbulent. she would go back over her journals and comment to herself. so, she would say, i am going to be good, is where it. i'm not going to lose my temper with my sisters. i know i will. you would see this, you know, just all along. her journalists protesting that she was going to be better, and going to get patients and then

she will write -- at 50 she still never got it. so she had been -- annotations to her own earlier self. you had a question? >> a quick one. i read in a book that after or during the civil war that she developed like many people in opium dependency, and i was wondering how that -- obviously that would change her life. a is that true and b was she still able to run, and how when your opinion to that affect her personally? >> well she used in her writing. it gave her material. she took opium to sleep she said, and periodically she would go on and off it. i think she was aware. i think people must have been aware of its dangers even though it was available and not expensive. it was really the only painkiller at the time. she had this these horrible headaches and she had real low

periods with depression. there was one six-month period map where she said she did nothing but sit in a room and ate and think about it. there was no remedy for a headache. i think she also took hashish, and i think in a way for recreation. she had a wonderful story about a young woman who was very much like her, very glamorized, but quite a bit and is in love with the young man but is afraid to admit it, that she feels that way and with a bunch of other young people having a picnic, it is down around the plymouth ducks very area that this is set. a medical student says, that is hashish candy and he passes around hashish candy because they were bored and so they take it. she takes some and she does it on the sly. she doesn't admit it, and then she and the guy that is in love with her and vice versa, go out

in a boat to try to find another member of the party who hasn't come back. so they are alone in a boat and anyway there is a big storm that comes up and they profess their love and they are rescued by a lighthouse keeper and they sailed back the next day. he says -- she says, i don't want you to say i took that she's. he said okay but if you will tell me why you took it. she said, i'm tired of being at lonely statue. i want to be soft and lovable like other women. that is what she says. then they fall into each other's arms and she says heaven bless hashish if it streams like this. and she does say she needed -- uses it in a novel also. she says no one who is not experience this and describe what it is. so that is what there is about

it. she was addicted to opium at areas times. any other questions? i think we should wrap it up. another question? last question. okay, well your curiosity is satisfied. thank you very much for bearing with me. [applause] i have been at this game for two weeks, for two weeks, so i'm really a neal fight. >> thank you very much. >> thank you. >> join us tuesday for more booktv coverage in prime-time on c-span2.

are booktv coverage continues with robert hirst, curator of the mark twain papers. he talks about publishing "the autobiography of mark twain." also david reynolds on the history of. teachers though's novel uncle tom's cabin in his book, mightier than the sword.

later harriet writes and talks about the author of "little women." in her book louisa may alcott. >> are booktv prime-time lineup starts with robert hirst curator of the mark twain project at the university of california berg way. he talks about publishing twain's autobiography 100 years after the author's death in 1910. this is an hour and 15 minutes. >> robert came to uc berkeley in 1963. he was a student. four years later, people seeing

his promise, offered him a job. he has been there ever since. in 1949, the granddaughter of mark twain gave uc berkeley the materials that are in the mark twain archives. in 1980, robert became the general editor of these archives and in 2005, they began the process of putting together the volumes, the first volume. i know many of you have already seen it. there will be three volumes, and there is a tremendous amount of excitement associated at you see press and with all of us who love the role that mark twain is has played in american literature and culture, to know that happen million copies of that autobiography have already been sold. it is on "the new york times" bestsellers list where it has

been for 14, 15, 19 weeks, a long time, and i am really delighted that we have robert here to tell us even more. robert hirsch. robert hirst's. [applause] >> i have to turn my cell phone here. no pun. thank you, susan, for that introduction. it always reminds me of the way of mark twain said he was introduced in california 140 years ago. he was on one of his first lecture tours in california. never published a book. of course nobody knew him. he was up in red dog, and no one even knew how to introduce him but finally the crowd persuaded a slouching and awkward minor to

get up on the stage and do the honors. feasted thinking a moment and mark twain says, he said i don't know anything about this. but rather i only know two things. one is, he hasn't been in the penitentiary, and the other is, i don't know why. [laughter] mark twain city like that as it was a complement that didn't raise expectations too high. [laughter] payne mark twain's official biographer put that into the biography because payne didn't know that mark twain himself had cut it out. so let me balance it with a little story or a few sentences that are in the auto butter faith. this is the end of an account of how mark twain escaped a duel that he had actually instigated

in virginia city. .. if i should have done this at the start. mark twain was a disciplined speaker and all i am not. i feel as a general rule of the problem is to get him to stop but i bring this along with me i call this the antifilibuster the

device to read what the site his own advice he was preparing to go on a tour and he was afraid he would take to -- too wong said he intends in his notebook this little introduction worth and says i will talk until on the entire year and then mr. reilly will talk until you are tired. [laughter] we are going to avoid until your tired and i promise and this goes off it will be very hard to persuade me to say anything else. so, what is so special about this autobiography? he tried for more than 30 years off and on to find a way to write his autobiography.

that is a long time even for him because he could quite easily spend four, five, six, seven, eight years on his major books. what's remarkable about him in this matter is she knew very early on how he wanted that autobiography to be constructed. you will see in the background manuscript that belong to the autobiography text. here are a few more. i'm going to put them up so you can contemplate them. this is what amy fields reported when mark twain was 40. she had a conversation with him in which he said that he -- she would talk about the autobiography she intends to write as police and sincerely as possible to leave behind a posthumous she should look it over and right passengers.

no, he said, and grenada almost stunningly. you are not to edit read it is to appear as it is written with a tail true as i can tell it. i shall take passages from it and published as i go along in the atlantic and elsewhere but i should not limit myself as to space and what every age i'm writing about even define an infant and an idea comes to me about myself when i'm 40i should put it in. it amazes me to see how clearly he knew what he wanted to at least 30 years before he actually started doing it. there are in the papers roughly two dozen false starts and isolate it chapters between 1870 and 1904 a period with 35 years, and we see him in those drafts

and chapters to give up to relinquish a chronological organization, something you and i would assume what for an autobiography. mark twain was struggling to leave that behind him. in any case, these beginnings committee's draft that we have come each seemed she abandoned them and stopped writing more schechter's but did not throw them away. but in 1904 shortly towards his wife's death he wrote a long dictation as a way will to compose his text but not a cradle to grave narrative it was to have this character of what he called the right way to do an autobiography which is to start at no particular time of your life, wander off at your free

well, to defeat to talk only about the things that interest you in the moment that the moment its interest pays and talk about the new and more interesting thing that is in your mind at the meantime. two years later in 1906 that is exactly what he began doing, dictating to a confident stone to the custom of a fur and typist for chu, three, sometimes for hours in the morning several times a week. she what type of per notes almost immediately and give them to clemens who actually delayed reading them for several months wanting to wait and see if this was going to work out. this process of dictation continued with some interruption through 1906 and 1907 than with less intensity in 1908 and 1909 and conclude of the 24th of

december, 1999 when his youngest daughter jean died in the bathtub and he saw a memorial to her which he identified as the end of the new autobiography. in less than four months, he was himself dead having contributed to this autobiography some 650,000 words compiled and the utterly confident defiance of the usual limit on such texts he just has yet to mention the 1976. there he is on the porch in new hampshire where a lot of dictation occurred, and there is in bed where is a lot of the dictation occurred she was a very relaxed person. susan mentioned the fact that this publication has an unusual history at least for those of us who are involved in the scholarly edition which has been

going on since 1967. i didn't bother to read the last week's "new york times" list, but in fact this sunday will be the 20 a week on the list. i think it's around 17. last week it was down around number 14 and as susan said there are 500,000 copies sold and printed. to give you an idea what that is compared with an hour experience let's say we will print 2,000 copies and expect to sell them over ten years, so this is a new game for us, and absolutely new game. in any case, all of the autobiographies are at berkeley. only very few are in other institutions possibly because paine gave them away and the

have been there since mark twain put them in the papers in 1910 so in what sense is it necessary to find mark twain's autobiography? one can't find something that hasn't been lost. i will try to make that clear as i go along. what are the mark twain papers? why do they exist? and why are they in berkeley? i will try to answer those questions but before i do that, i have to do a little bit more on the recent publication. this book has already been awarded these prizes by the american publishers association. i think it's interesting that we never won this prize before. i think maybe the award was given for the number of copies sold. i can't be sure. mark twain said in 1908 she was going to start a new hobby. he was going to collect

complement's the way other people collect horses and photographs and so forth and so on. this is one of the compliments he collected if you want to see it. he cuts an article out of the newspaper, that is a ten which you can see their consent to a piece of paper and now not all of the handwriting is mr. mark twain. there's the compliment. the complement is an american loves his family that has love left over for some other person he generally selects mark twain and mark twain says i think the world of that complement. yes he does. yes he does. there's another complement he cited in the same 1908 speech that i am referring to. i've given you is transcription in case his handwriting isn't clear you can follow that.

a little montana throws complement mark twain says someone from allin i sent this to him. she was gazing thoughtfully a photograph of mark twain on the neighbors mantelpiece and she said we have a jesus like that at home only hours has more trimmings. [laughter] what does she mean by more trimming? [laughter] so for those of you that have forgotten what jesus looked like pulled a copy of one of the family bibles mark twain said that the difference in the trimmings was the halo. his had not arrived yet. all of this is just a way of saying that mark twain has in his own lifetime an enormous silent audience of what he called a submerged audience, an audience that didn't go to bookstores. it wasn't like you and me, but it's and intelligent and and

collectors and so forth. they simply bought his books on a lower basis and read them. submerged, he called it, or submerged clientele. adamle stevenson discussed this and when they're sitting out in the son of in new york city that story is told in the autobiography and she and stevenson agreed that this kind of fame that comes from people who we've never met and we are unlikely ever to meet was of all the kind of things the best, the very best. i think something like that kind of thing is operating when people by mark twain's first volume of the autobiography. i think that audiences coming into view in a way that we've never seen it, not in my lifetime. now, we didn't expect this, as you know. the original estimate on our

part was perhaps 10,000 copies. it would be five times what we normally sell or rent for that matter. the press is now on public record saying that they thought maybe 100,000 copies would be it, and i remember that in discussing what the photograph should be on the front of the jacket one of the people from the press said they want something particularly capturing the would lead off the table that you. [laughter] he felt there was rather discouraging so we thought would be good to document the table at kosko or brand new copies and that is something she had never seen before. now, we did do certain things to solve this book that we wouldn't

normally ordinarily do. [laughter] we sold to the various magazines, atlantic, harper's and as you see, playboy what are called first serial rights. these are basically small chunks of the autobiography. all it needed to be as short, unpublished and funny. that was easy. so playboy got one. and of course i should say not everybody approved of the autobiography. perhaps the more famous -- the most famous disapproval comes from garrison, and i promised him the advertisement for this talk to at least address what he had to say. actually we can hear what tina has to say that's a little easier to follow. she quotes him shares a powerful argument for writers burning

their papers. a little further down the, think about donating your papers to an institution of higher learning, a famous writer. someday they may be used against you. i think it's clear what that he doesn't like the autobiography. it's also clear that he hasn't read it very carefully. he's encountering a scholarly edition without really acknowledging that. but i think with the one thing i wanted to see publicly is that it's good advice not to give your papers to an institution like this. otherwise you might end up with a 500,000 copy best-seller being sold 100 years after you are dead or not. they simply had no patience with what they regard as academic overture and for that reason they simply misread the first

half of the book and foremost on willfully aware that one-third of the biography, the actual autobiography is in this volume. that is so because the volume has to would begin with the preliminary experiments that you object between 1870's 1904. so really coming you get in this volume only three months of the dictations mark twain started in january, 1906. they will go on for another three years. so it's a little harsh to judge for autobiography on that sample. and i do think that "the new york times," which published an editorial about this -- i've never seen them review a book in the editorial page before this -- i think they were right. let me read you what they said. mark twain is terrific company, planning and simple. he knew everyone, went everywhere, seemed to be interested in everything and capable of making the reader in

2010 laugh on nearly every page. and this isn't strictly speaking in autobiography the ex plan with their fragments. the system that he finally found for doing so is perfect. he talks about what he's interested in until he is no longer interested and then he talks of of something else wondering at free will. this is a book for dipping, not plunging. until the interest pails and then jump it feels like a form of time travel one moment you are on horseback in the island were recovering cigar in your mouth and then we can hardly wait for the volume ii. and if you want more positive comment on those negative reviews, but andrew's review of the new york. he comments on both of them and

then comes down on the site of what he calls "the new york times" editorial. he wouldn't have been seized by these but he says in the autobiography i believe the trade of the literature and music and the trauma is the most degraded of all trades and a has no real value however it is the rule of god we must have missionaries and congressmen and bear the burden and then in the meantime. she was steady in that view of critics when he was asked by his older brother to read one of the compositions he refused seen the great public opinion is where it's headed. that is another way to assume one. allow me to leave those behind

and talk a little bit more about the papers were. you can see from the slide a little section of the letter mark twain got in the habit in the last of his life and probably before that writing things he was confident he couldn't publish in his lifetime. he didn't dare and putting them in what he calls his large box of posthumous stuff where he has stacks of literary remains. so in the mark twain papers are 700 manuscripts some some of them finished, some of them on a finished, many of the embrey, most of them brief in fact many of them quite interesting when of unpublished because they are bad but other circumstances and that is the core of the mark twain papers but it isn't something i can easily talk about or explain so i'm going to

try another tactic for talking about what's in the papers because in addition to all of those manuscript's there's all kind of stuff and this is a little overwhelming it's meant to be a. of 700 manuscript soon and this is a book he makes in 1848 the earliest known document read a sample of his hair, 50 notebooks, checks, bills, clippings, proved, photographs and on and on and on. those are all things that are not a literary benefits or they are not the main core of the papers but they are one way of understanding the fact he left

this deride. it's unusual for a writer to be willing to leave all of his unpublished manuscripts, his drafts and notes not to mention his checks about how much he drank and so forth and so on. unusual for an author and in my opinion unique to leave that behind. mark twain said he could imagine being dead. most people it's looking down or up from somewhere and reading the autobiography but that is not a lie imagine that. what i'm pretty sure i will like it when i die so it might be a little uneasy here and there but he is quite willing for the world to see this and i think there is a parallel between that kind of bravery if you will and the publication of the autobiography.

i'm just going to go into a few details things that are in there so you get a sense of what the papers hold. this is the earliest known image of mark twain. taking money as a printer and you can see that he is holding a printer stick with the letters sam would. it's an exercise a typesetter what to do to learn how to set up advertisements for the newspaper. the interesting thing about this partly is that it's literally the earliest and he put his hand to. he was in the paper since the beginning but not discovered until 84. that is an aspect of papers which is remarkable.

we are still finding things we didn't know that we had. this is a late photographs he's returning and he will die in a few weeks. here's another photograph and this has been described as a practical joke. it's not a practical joke. mark twain had commissioned his protege, carl, and that was photographed and put in the front. and then the sculpture will tell you if he wanted to get the nec right you have to see the shoulders so mark twain those, an art photographer and has a picture of himself taken so the sculpture can make that. i dare say that he thought it was funny, too so she kept it and it's probably the only absolutely unique photograph of him anywhere.

this is an example of what we had. [laughter] i put it in because it requires no explanation. here's another one talking about someone who went out on the quaker city describing in this photograph here is the real old familiar plymouth church complacency of 40 years ago. it's the we got looks when he had a successful season. now this is an early notebook. this one comes when he was learning to be a pirate. this blue heading means from the new orleans dull touch to the head of island 62, 63, and these are basically his notes about the passage of the river, what kind of problems he encountered and how he should navigate in the future. he hadn't yet published a this. there's another notebook i just isolated this phrase mark twain

is really just recording the depth of the water and he means they are two and a half, two and a quarter or 2,000. here's that here i was mentioning. why would we bother with his hair? it is what we call a well tested example. it's a connection problem. to open intel wireless troubleshooter i don't think so. all the help they can get. they are attending a and mark twain is the most. of 1905 she describes it in great detail and includes a swatch of his hair. what good is that? shares another thing i found in

that bible i don't know if you can see the hair down here this is the same flip over. it's been folded at the bottom to hold on to the hair. this is a poem not written by mark twain but actually taken from a magazine this says up here for margaret and it was our supposition naturally that this was machine clemency of memorializing her 9-year-old daughter who died when she was naim, something fairly common in those days. but that's just a guess. we can do something with the evidence we have, so if you look at the mitochondrial dna on this one and the mitochondrial dna in this one if they have the same who mitochondrial dna then they have the same mother. so we know a little bit more about how mark twain's sister was born. this is just two pages from the manuscript board mark twain is

imagining himself over in germany and he's missing american food so he starts off the business to pages of a four page list, but the wonderful thing about this is you can see him coming back to it and underlining things is forgotten and changing the whole content in a way that shows that this is of great interest to him. we also have lots of letters. this is the most important letter mark twain ever wrote. it's written from san francisco in october, 1865. she is down and out so to speak, he is without a job or recently put has taken a job out of money probably drinking too much and he writes to his older brother and sister-in-law and says he

only has two powerful ambitions in life. one is to become a pilot and together and minister of the gospel. i accomplished the one, he says, and field in the other because i couldn't provide myself unnecessary stock and trade of religion. i've given up for ever. i never had a call in that direction and of my aspirations for the ecstasy of presumption pravachol for literature. it's nothing to be proud of but it's my strongest suit. he goes around to make something of that talent even though to the lower level of literature. one last thing i want to point out about this mark twain who knows this is an important letter. ps2 better show for if we strike a bargain i don't want and need

literary remains published after i am planted. unfortunately they didn't burnet but that's a remarkable statement for someone who hasn't yet published a book. he didn't lack confidence. here's another letter he wanted cowal to read the professor says yesterday, mr. hall, the publisher car wrote improving my punctuation for me and i told him to get shot without giving him time to pray. >> to give a sample of 11,000 letters i thought i would take a small category of those which he's answering the begging letters come answering one of answering. this is one someone asking him to support an infamous while which is an orphanage to which the best success in the long career of usefulness good words

are empty and show this. therefore i am willing to be one of a thousand citizens who will agree to this enterprise. [laughter] then he goes on and gives a double signature, not always that way. he knows what they will do with it would they will still look for a $200 contribution. mark twain didn't always answer such letters and when he didn't he often wrote what he would have said at least increase on the envelope. this is a good example of his sharpness matched up with his tender heart. the idiot seemed to be uncommonly thick. once god knows what. a decline. good for an autograph letter. the excuse for an autograph

letter didn't persuade him. from someone who wants to destroy the death penalty with future violence. from an unknown eddy yet in ireland this is the worst piece and all. from a boston nasa and in today's leaders from the same boston mass. from some unknown person who probably has the brains and modesty of equal proportions. i could go on with examples like this all through the papers. this is a letter that as part of another aspect of his replying to the autographs he figures out a way to answer the request, grant the request but have a little fun in the process. this is the answer to someone who was an employee of the

dayton ohio asylum for the in same, he could be the administrator and he used the letter of the stationary mark twain's ticked off to where he's coming from. certainly i will read an article for your collection and what is more present to the offices of the asylum i said such a thing i believe that you are wickedly and unjustly confined their. [laughter] portions of your letter to me are quite rational and i'm satisfied if you're put under judicious treatment he would get over it. then of course my signature, the whole theory behind this is when he gets this letter and reads it he may change his mind about showing it to his friends. dozens of such letters. years when i didn't put in the slides and you have to listen carefully to this.

a long time answering your letter you must remember it's an equally long time since i've received. [laughter] so that makes us even and nobody can blame either side. i think you'd like to know it's a 52nd audience usually takes about ten seconds to get that one. here's another to the english writer william valentine. he was so impatient for a reply that he enclosed a piece of paper and a stamp with his original letter. mark twain answered paper and stand received. [laughter] please send envelope. [laughter] one more point before i go on and get to the autobiography, mark twain loved cancellations

and unlike you and me he would probably never send something in the mail that had as a jew cancellation. you and i may be embarrassed to do that but he was not. he knew the cancellation could be read. here was our attempt to read it with the kind of tracing -- it took us about six months to pass it around the office giving people each a shot and you can see we are still having trouble with the second line. we can't really do that confidently because the way you read such a thing is by picking up the whom descenders and the ascenders and those are the consonants or this case it was and i but the help you narrow down what is likely to be under and for this will stretch of

one, no dots on the eye or anything so it took awhile to get it but we finally did get it he starts over and a suspicion comes over me. this is a suspicion that i owe you either 25 or $50 it was in this way and so forth and so on. how do we know? this is a piece home from a letter he writes to his fiancee who was trying to persuade him to become a christian and is wary about the letters she receives and noticed only one of them he's torn out a whole section of the page and sent the page with the letters and she has asked him what was that confession? he says the confession was i refuse $600 because -- and now because we are at this point i

can't tell it again. you would say that i were a lovesick idiot. and between ourselves, i am. i could not be so reckless to write the above. if you had any curiosity, if you were curious enough to kind of pride under the cancellation and figure out what i said then i would dare to write this but of course we can tell now it was written precisely to advise her to uncover it and she knows she will not do that and this down here in the brackets as another speaker this is when she discovers what he just said and what she's done. how do we know that that actually worked? because mark twain in vince a way to prevent the cancellations he goes in and he crosses and adds ascenders and the cinders and in general this leaves you so badly that unless you know

that's gone now you simply cannot read the cancellation. and -- i will give you an example just to show what editors are at work on this for 40 years. this is something that not everybody understands or nose. we are very lucky simply to understand it and it was something i think citizen in good stead, you can't get work on the autobiography for which i'm actually going to get right now with 20 minutes to go. as i see it there are actually two kinds of stories. the story of mark twain who tried and tried and eventually succeeded in doing an autobiography and another story which is how the editors

themselves wrestled with the documents they left behind and figure out what no one had known before. no one had known mark twain finished his autobiography but he knew what he wanted in it and what he did not want so that is the sense i have in mind when i talked about finding the autobiography. the 5,000 pages in the mark twain papers but unless you know how to understand the pages you won't find his autobiography. you will find what others have found and mistaken for the autobiography. why did mark twain want to suppress or not publish in its entirety for a hundred years i don't think this is a very complicated question. he wants the freedom to compress it as he wants to without fear of hurting anybody's feelings and not just people who are alive in these ridings but to is there a descendant or ascendant.

100 years of a nice round figure but this shows that on occasion this is about to be typed up and in force over 2,406. that just shows you that's a long time. it doesn't show that much time because why? was this the things which i'm about to say will be commonplaces of the time and barron of offense whereas they couldn't inflict pain upon my friends and acquaintances and the strangers. no desire to hurt and could get me ostracized and cut off from all human fellowship and the ostracism is the main thing. i am a human and nothing can persuade me to do any bad deed or a good one that would bring that punishment upon me.

that isn't a motive that is widely recognized. there is another and that is selling the book. this is about to go to the north american review in which mark twain published a very small selection of the autobiography in 1906 and 1907 edited down so there was nothing offensive in it but this shows you that he is addressing the editor and saying david, let's proceed every installment that since the autobiography will not be issued in book form during my lifetime so you basically have 25 separate reminders that this autobiography is not really in the north american view and you can't get it until mark twain guice that's what we call a marketing plan. [laughter] >> people ask me why isn't it published before? the answer is it has been partly

published before and badly published. this is the official biographer and the publisher of the autobiography of 1924 and his successor in 1940. this was a man named charles who wasn't one of the editors but basically got access to the autobiography after he had come to berkeley. i've given three pictures to show you editing mark twain -- [laughter] to be fair i include this, too. [laughter] that shows since 1967 and who the guilty parties are of the time. i'm just the kind of supervisor. i don't do any editing on the corner office of who criticizes what they do and am not welcomed

most of the time. i do want to talk about why those additions are not satisfactory. they fell free to write on the original documents. you can see all of these pencil markings are by pain and he numbers them as a part of the printers copy and when the printer system what does he do? he puts them on a spindle. that is what this little hole is about. i mention this not to just kind of beat up on him because it does lead to the fact there are things that should have been in the autobiography that are gone, that are lost and one of the things the editors manage to do is to solve that problem as well. we can see down here he has

decided he doesn't like what is being said here, blow it a little bit for you. this is a discussion of a man who is a faith healer called an when she was paralyzed a number of years, couldn't stand or walk after a fall. doctors did no good at all and they were finally persuaded to hire this guy and mark twain says he makes passes with his hands but keen doesn't like that, it is pagen so new to an open up the windows and delivered a short prayer. and when mark twain repeats this with his hands over the head he crosses it out. that's the way that has been published in pnac and schneider because he couldn't tell this

wasn't mark twain. here's a couple more pages that illustrate the way that they treated these things. he's on record saying he disapproved of to punctuation and he took out hundreds and hundreds of, as and dashes when he published it. he only publishes a very small selection of it and owls you see he is currently free to write on the instructions to his typist and in this case he crossed dhaka, as. of course mark twain is over here and over here so one of the problems in dealing with this is to figure out which are the authors, how dewey note of those were his? if you text the text of what he's done this to and compare to the way that he publishes you can see the, as have disappeared

so here we have mark twain writing and a dodo. it's one of the achievements they figured out how to distinguish between all of the markings. here's an example that has maybe five different handwritings. all of the pencil markings come here is by pain, they were all by pain. they also have his typesetter. this is [speaking in native tongue] , this is louisa may alcott. someone we don't know and here is mark twain. what does that mean? she's and correct some some of the things that this cannot afford it's wrong. for instance, here the stenographer has written an effect nonexistent and

infeasible but clearly that is not what he said. he crosses on feasible and inserts invisible and then decides that isn't needed either because of it isn't the existence of course it is in on and visible. so the challenge is to figure out exactly what mark twain wanted and leave out the desire of the other markers. another challenge hard to explain but worth contemplating is that in many of these daily dictations, one, two, three, four, sometimes slightly less, sometimes just to types copies of the syndication.

this is the front page you can see it looks roughly the same throughout and here this is page 726, the next is 883, this one is for and this one is 1115. this is a big mystery why those differences so prominent, what does it imply about the manuscript? does it imply he's moving around and gets different things when he answers in different places? why don't think so. we didn't think so. even chile we could say it wasn't this, this is the way normal manuscript is transmitted. no, that is what happened here to read it was eventually figured out by identifying the physical characteristics that there was one central scrap to one made from the original

stenographers notes and that at some high point they had it been the type to and what we call ts2 and what we call ts4. that's obvious because it tells what has the most authority and what to make of the variants and manuscript's here but the problem is this one is page one and this is for 08. these high numbers imply that there is something missing appear but where is it? actually it was in the file we just didn't know it. this was not the los angeles freeway, this was a diagram, the situation, the relationship. i can't even understand it myself. this is actually the relationship we figured out that

was prominent and occupies all of the folders. and then do ts12, that's the for example. how do we find this out? she wrote a series of holograph pages that he intended to be in the autobiography. no you can see the page one, and an early attempt this is the panamax but to something that he's done in the past but he's a failure an example of the old and flexible and difficult method of autobiography and just giving -- you can see what i went through to get to a final solution to as page three.

it would be great if you knew what they were. well we didn't know and it will turns out they've been launched. the only way we can describe is the things we are made from, the original manuscript and the type scrapes that were not made of it. so you can see here the next pages and for what 45 because this follows 44 pages. the page this is why? this was to proceed some of the example of dictation that he had done in 1904. of those like that this is the text that he is referring to that he wants to begin with. it's wonderful text despite the fact that he says it's not so good. this was his description of june 1986 and those pages are being written this is a lines

description of his reading on the porch. mr. clemens ruda of first of the graphic meaning written. 44 type pages telling him it's beautiful. he was deeply moved and on and on. in other words, we know from this mark twain knows this is a movie and a wonderful passage. then as i said by the latest attempt he says this is the end of that and we hope they will follow. it's the first time in history they've been for an autobiography. there were all for racial arts and that is what explains these bumps. things were put in place after the type p.s. one was made but the second is still the sport is

made. there he is again one. now i've got roughly seven minutes. it's a little incoherent to do this to this way but i'm going to do it anyhow. there's a couple of wonderful passages about who grover cleveland that i owe it to mark twain to read simply because that gives a better idea of the autobiography or i can on my own. mark twain did not know cleveland when they were residents in buffalo and how they met. during the time we were in buffalo and 70 and 71, mr. cleveland was the sheriff and forgot to make his acquaintance or see him go. in fact i suppose i was not even aware of his existence. 14 years later he would become the greatest man in the state.

i was not living in the state at the time. [laughter] >> six seconds. that's pretty good. i wasn't in the street at that time. at the time i was on the public highway and it was at the george w. cable robbing the public with readings from our works over the four months and over the course of time we went to albany to play a tribute to revise and we ought to go and pay our respects for the governor, so we went to that majestic capitol building and state and our own. we were showing to the governor's private office and i saw him for the first time. we stood chatting. i was born lazy and i comforted myself by turning the corner of the table into a sort of seat. the governor said mr. clemens that was the servicers in buffalo a good while ago during those months there suddenly into

a mighty thing out of a previous long continued and no doubt deserved proper of security one. [laughter] but i was nobody and you wouldn't notice me or have anything to do with me but now that i've become somebody will change your style and come here to shake hands. how do you explain that? this is the president-elect. very simply, your excellency, you were nothing but a share if. i was in society. i couldn't afford to associate with sheriff's but to wear a governor now and you are on your way to the presidency. there's a great difference. [laughter] there appeared to be about 16 doors to that room from each store and young man now emerged and lined up and moved forward and stood in front of the governor with an aspect of respect and see in their attitude. no one spoke for a moment and the governor said you are

dismissed, gentlemen, your services are not required. mr. clemens is sitting on the bells. [laughter] perhaps you can see down here he is keeping the cost out. he doesn't like the explicitness. this is what mark twain says you could pull it out of this because the way payne publishes it but he also says there's a cluster of 16 on the corner of the table and proportions of that were just right to enable me to cover the whole of that mess. and that is helicon to hatch out the 60 clerks. [laughter] so you are going to get to see what he actually wrote for the first time. they will try to squeeze this in no triet clarence stevan got

married in the white house to president cleveland 1984 and was the first person to be married in the white house she has you can see is beautiful and young and she was a great asset to the cleveland administration because she wanted to go well and be a sort of jackie kennedy to the world. but one more thing. does anybody know what the politics are? snowshoes are galoshes or boots, too much pavement and washington especially during the wintertime in case you need to know that i was born needless and am consciously and unconsciously breeching the proprieties which brought upon me humiliations or often humiliated me but they didn't because i didn't know anything had happened. but his wife news of the humiliation stopped who would

not burn them and did not deserve them. she always said i was the most difficult child she had. she was very sensitive about me. it distressed her to see me do things that could bring me endure criticism and commesso she was watchful and alert to bring me back from the transgressions i had been speaking out. when i was leaving hartford for washington for the reception at the white house on the occasion she said i have written a small warning and put it into the pocket of your dress invest. when you are addressing to go to the reception at the white house you will naturally put your fingers in your vest pocket. according to your custom and find that little note. read it carefully and do as it tells you. i cannot be with you so i don't get my duties to this note to recover if i should review the warning we shall be forgotten in a few minutes. as president cleveland's first term and i had never seen his wife, the young and beautiful,

departed from a sympathetic, the fascinating. shorty enough as i was finishing to go to the white house i found out that little note which i would have forgotten. it was a grave little note, cereus like its writer but it made me laugh. her gentle gravity effect upon me with the humorous joke would have failed with for i do not laugh easily. shall i finish? when we've reached the white house and i was shaking hands with president she started to say something that i interrupted him and said if your excelencia will excuse me, i will come back in a moment. but now i have a very important matter to attend to and must be at once. i turned to mrs. cleveland, the young, the beautiful, the fascinating, and gave her my card on the back of which i'd written he didn't come he didn't. and i asked her to sign her name below those words. she said he didn't? he didn't want?

i said never mind we cannot start to discuss that now. this is urgent won't you please sign your name? why? she said i cannot commit myself in that way. what is it that he didn't? i said time is flying will, flying. want to take me out of your distress and sign your name. i give you my word it's all right. she hesitatingly took the pen and said i will sign it, i will take the risk but you must tell me all about afterwards so you can be arrested in case there should be anything criminal about this. then she signed and i happened to the car can deter mrs. clemens' note which was simple and sweet and to the point that said don't wear your ar kicks in the white house. [laughter] it made her shelter and she summoned the messenger and we

spent that to the mail on the way to mrs. clemens. [laughter] thank you very much. ..

>> around the autobiography

and i would like to ask how the editors make millions of decisions. how do they find themselves by being fat pathway? >> once you figure out the relationship between those two groups and is a standard way to treat them one who has the most notes has the most authority anything that is different is either mistakes or changes. you would adopt those putting into the beginning text and then have exactly what he wanted from what those documents could tell

you. that is so large and unfinished that it is not ready for the press or the printer and will say things like this celebration of her purse for my 75th birthday there is no way physically you can put it in the most we could do would be to insert a blank. i should have said all of this is available free of charge. you do not have to buy it. that has some of advantages but as far as shape being what he does we're not trying tata touche bit of follow those early mentions the reaction we put in the fund of the book was to not

belong in the autobiography. one of the problems is that he treats them they are. mark twain did not want them included. and that is the first time that we knew he knew what was to begin so to follow the chronology. >> one of the questions the audience asked is how did they get a hold of say autobiography and how did they get past his wish 100 years after his death?

>> if you read the newspapers you would have think he wrote the embargo into his will. he did not. it is just not that firm. it is more there to protect him as he composes he knows he will be dead and cannot control when anybody publishes. but paine was one of the first literary editors of the mark twain misstate mark twain appointed him assigned him the right to do the autobiography and he goes over the papers with the only surviving daughter until he dies. he is such the exclusion nest that bernard katz ticked off because he tries to write a book about mark twain but pain dies in the

squeaky wheel is appointed the successor. then still out the diversity how did they get to do what they wanted to do? but it he thinks that would interfere with the sales of "harper's" addition. did i not answer that? if not please speak up. >> what percentage of day autobiography not including the editor edition is the original dictation started in 1906? >> almost the entire

percentage, 100% of the finished autobiography. there are manuscript pieces then but the one that he wanted published is almost entirely fictitious. >> is there any proof the coldest winter i ever spent was in san francisco? >> as far as i know what but we do know that he quotes an actor saying that about paris. one could see how that would be changed into san francisco prepare for year cities like vancouver and

say did you say that about seattle? i will offer $75 said day. [laughter] but the fact is i cannot prove the negative but we have looked for it never finding any evidence that he said it. did he ever live in san francisco? he would have been imprisoned if caught doing. he takes a job on this and princess go morning call as a local reporter. he hates local reporting and it is about the time barnes is willing to fire him. then stays in san francisco without serious employment writing things for california but living off the and come but then those

stocks disappear and he has to get a job. he writes his old boss and let me write a day the letter from san francisco to the enterprise. they said do it. you should look in your attic most of those that survive are contemporary newspapers that reprinted because it was very good copy and it was free. >> the person to ask the

question knows if you know, the labor good. >> you could piece out the neighborhood although to me it does not look like the neighborhood but he mentions being on montgomery street you can figure out if roughly where he was yet day she did meet robert louis stevenson did not know him for very long. he in mark twain come up with this idea of a submerged audience in talk about discussing this and to stay warm and mark twain did not have a long correspondence. >> can you talk about more of the submerged audience?

>> you could read it for yourself. do not rely on my summary but the section on stevenson is that the beginning but stevenson proposes to say this% davis has published spectacular books and very practical which he has discovered sell in the enormous quantities. in discovered this from a bookseller. he never heard anything of the sky no bidders figured out it is not davis but the man who wrote practical books named dick that sold into the millions. the idea is this someone who is the unknown to the normal world but they were below the surface but they were

right. >> who -- what was the extent of mark twain's formal education? >> he left school at the age of 12 when his father died. but all grades in one room, you can guess from the age of 12 what grade he was then but not that formal. he is one of the true great autodidacts. he has no formal training doesn't even have day wailing ship let alone harvard yale but if you study and find out he has read everything. read and read. principally nonfiction but very, very wide lead just

looking references to all kinds of literary themes like shakespeare and that kind of stuff. but with the beginning of the new appetite. >> why was he chosen to receive the papers? >> i did not explain this very well. mark twain wrote his well in such a way that his descendants or his daughter, could not and makeover the papers or sell or give the papers to anybody except through their own well. this was designed to protect them from men, it did not work per second has been ripped hurt offer of about

$5 million. but it kept the papers together. he would love to sell them piece by piece but couldn't. the legal situation couldn't. when they were out here, they go from paying he resigns 5916 times and then takes them out. he was a courtly texan knowing how to deal with clara but then decide to was to go to berkeley and can i take the papers with me? she says sure. before they arrive he writes to say you should change your will so that instead of going to yale which could choose where they were intended, they go to berkeley. he was worried she would die

and those papers would be skewed to doubt and the biography based solely on those papers would come to a halt that is why. do not get me wrong but not until she dies at 1862 -- 1962 but then to get them back piecemeal all of those people who are in charge were wise enough to resist. he was somewhat of a snake, a gambler and with those letters that were in the family. and then offering 50,000 and they said that was too much in 1952. however comes back in three weeks in says $10,000 but i

need the money by sunday. so they go to lou the bank of america to get him his $10,000 and know that he did those other things that were held by clara and oversold. >> interesting. it three negative made there is a mark twain luncheon club that has been meeting for quite some time, twice a year. they are one of the individuals that have funded the mark twain project and those who endeavor. can you talk more about the funding funded on its inception says the endowment for the humanities have been absolutely loyal to us.

we must be the longest running project ever had to pay for but beginning 1980 they said we will shift to matching grants and have to raise the dollar to give a dollar. all grants have been 50/50 and it is my job to find people who are willing to give that kind of money on the basis of what we do and what they hope we will do. we have been successful recently but not a challenge that goes away. it will always be there. >> but the world is better. [laughter] thank you for joining us. [applause]

>> welcome to the harry beecher stowe foundation we're just delighted you're here to introduce david reynolds new book and hear about harry it beecher stowe and of gold, have been. very exciting. we use her story to inspire social justice and not just about the past but we want to take those issues so to solve today's problems so we could continue to work to

fill the promise of america. period beecher stowe best known for "uncle's tom cabin" amazingly complex book and american history. the book will be officially released june 142011. but tonight as we are you can buy tonight your own copies and you can get the books on a day and a the price tonight is a special price so when you go to your bookstore you should just get it to nine. [laughter] starting to get to notes david reynolds trying to figure this out because a book like this has a very

long lead time and another works very hard on all of the background in research before the writing starts. so we are very delighted to meet him in person. this is exciting there is a human being behind the voice on the telephone. he received his b.a. from members college and a ph.d. from university of california berkeley and taught at northwestern and barnard colleges and -- in in new york and truckers and then move to the city university of new york and now distinguished professor of english and american studies at the graduate center. he is a widely published author and the books have been recognized including

the bancroft prize. he was also the finalists for the book critics circle award and the editor for six books and the author of waking giant. and those that seated civil rights and john brown also a connecticut, you're already seeing some overlap. officer of walt whitman's america and day book with the straightforward title walt whitman. end also been d.c. mayor 10 renaissance. and i find the words aversive came of a lot and the analysis of "uncle's tom cabin" and also the author of the emergence of

religious literature in america. you begin to understand how often he may have run into harriet beecher stowe and "uncle's tom cabin." his latest book is mightier than the sword "uncle's tom cabin" which is really used-- released june 14th on period beecher stowe's 200 birthday and also it would be a another edition of "uncle's tom cabin" but you have to wait until then to get so please join me in welcoming david to the harriet beecher stowe center. [applause] >> thank you very much catherine. what i will do is comment for 15 or 20 minutes then we

will have a friend the dialogue then open up for q&a from the audience. it is great to be here at this historic center. the hall where harriet beecher stowe spent the last two decades of life next to mark twain in the rich environment. i have done research here and by a appreciate everything the center has done and this is such a great year to come to the stowe a center as the 200 anniversary of the birth of harriet beecher stowe whose anti-slavery novel "uncle's tom cabin" created the uproar that abraham lincoln reported the calls hers a little lady who made the great war.

it is possibly apocryphal but i think it is true with my research other than a blink and but that was the ideal moment but that is a deal time to reconsider in to influence history although "uncle's tom cabin" is associated with the civil war said it only had minimal influence on the politics. that has tremendous opinion that tocqueville regarded as stronger than the government

will link can declare the government rests on public opinion and whoever can change that can change the government. and he was recognizing what some historians today that culture and politics are often treated with a separate demand and looking at lincoln and the team of rivals and the politics behind the civil war or the civil war battles but then over here we read books. we read music and on theater in culture and then of a few chapters on politics and the culture but we have two

realize that too many historians overlooked them. too many on both sides neglect that. when we look at history we realize vividly history and politics are not separate and it is a tasty of wires who lead the way. and then the politics follow. sometimes the cultural outliers are the forces of destruction and the recent crime example is al qaeda at a tiny group that has guided much of western politics over the last decade. but the jury is still out of the ultimate political

outcome of another strong political force of social networking the sometimes cultural out fires can have identified -- identifiable a good results. and those who led to political change could be called positive. in few phenomenon have swayed public opinion as powerful as the novel "uncle's tom cabin" which was central to make america a more egalitarian nation. harriet beecher stowe was part of change diminutive and was a housewife with a brood of children.

various obscure illnesses were sent by chronic hypochondriac and married to a brilliant but impractical husband. but driven by her passionate interest of slavery, she wrote "uncle's tom cabin" wind appeared in 1852, a book sales records and became the international sensation. and it has excited more attention cents many books as the invention of pre-to eight -- printing and the author noted were an immense number of people much less a book by the state of michigan and consciousness in which they did not sit or read or ask the time. but they walk and talk and

laugh and cry. my new book and on coal thomas cabin which will be officially published on the 200th birthday in advance copies are for sale here today. they came from an idea i had to write for a biography of the book. previously written by the cultural of liars in books about others but now i want to tell the story of on call tom's cabin in exploit its place in history in place and time. my a book shows how the books unprecedented popularity can be