The Mark Twain Project contains the private papers Samuel Langhorne Clemmons personally made available to his official biographer Albert Bigelow Paine. The project, housed in The Bancroft Library at the University of California Berkeley, is under the direction of Robert H. Hirst who has been involved in editing the archive since the 1960’s and became the General Editor in 1980.



“From the point of view of intellectual fun, The Mark Twain Project is hard to beat. Finding just one letter can make your whole day,” said Hirst.



Hirst knows of no other 19th century American author who has had such a comprehensive collection compiled. The collection of photocopies and originals makes it possible to read almost every known document in Twain’s handwriting.



It is the mission of the project to obtain and authenticate reliable and accurate text from all of Twain’s published work, including letters he sent and received. “A staff of eight editors works full-time on the project and we try to hire four or five Berkeley students a year to participate in the project,” said Hirst.



The project has published a comprehensive, six-volume edition of the papers and is now principally focused on going digital to establish an electronic source for the collection. “We want to do it and do it well,” said Hirst. The project consists of chronological files of all known letters by Twain or his immediate family. The electronic source gives researchers a full chronology of Twain’s correspondence.

The Project treats Twain’s letters as the most important part of his writing.



“Of the approximately 50,000 known written letters, Berkeley has the actual text of at least 11,000,” said Hirst, “And we still average finding at least one letter a week.”



Hirst is an undeniable expert on Twain’s handwriting. With the authentication of newly found writing, Hirst acknowledges his expertise. “Yes, no question,” he said, “I’m not modest about that.” He has seen thousands of pages of writing and has also begun reading and translating “cancelled” passages as well. Twain liked to scribble over lines of his own writing and leave the clues for the reader to decipher.

There are many sources of new letters from individuals to eBay. Hirst recounted a story of a stamp collector who came to The Bancroft Library with a bag of letters purchased at an auction. “He asked someone in the library, ‘Who is S.L. Clemmons?’ and of course we were glad to have a group of over 100 letters to add to the collection,” said Hirst.



Since the biographer Paine’s death in 1937, the papers have been edited by four literary executors for Clemmons’ estate, and the papers have traveled from Harvard to the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, before coming to Berkeley.

As the project has grown, Hirst said he has shifted roles from the editing of Twain’s papers to fundraising.



Hirst said he thinks Mark Twain had a sense that his work would live on after him and that might be why he set up a plan for his family to preserve his letters for posterity. “He tended not to throw things away,” Hirst said, “he never wrote a dull letter and you are getting to know someone as a friend and gradually getting to know what he was like as a person over the many years of his life.”