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As usual, the reports of Mark Twain’s death are greatly exaggerated.

Twain may have died 100 years ago, but with the new edition of his “Autobiography” weighing in at No. 5 on the New York Times best-seller list, Twain is as raucously alive as ever.

“Autobiography of Mark Twain,” Volume One, is the result of the herculean labors of the editors at the Mark Twain Project at the University of California, Berkeley. It’s fitting that this center of Twain scholarship is across the Bay from San Francisco, for San Francisco was the setting for one of the decisive turning points in Twain’s life. It was where he hit rock bottom and where he bounced back, discovering his vocation and writing the story that made his name.

It was in the bohemian, irreverent city at the continent’s end, and a year earlier in the rollicking mining town of Virginia City, Nev., that the young man from Hannibal, Mo., began his literary career.

Working as a reporter, first for the Territorial Enterprise, and then the San Francisco Daily Morning Call, Twain invented the untrammeled persona that was to make him America’s most famous and beloved writer. He arrived in the Far West as Samuel Clemens, and left as Mark Twain.

But it was not a smooth transformation.

Twain, to put it mildly, was not cut out to be a reporter. Being employed as a “lokulitems,” the disparaging term for reporters who grubbed for local tidbits, was “fearful drudgery, soulless drudgery, and almost destitute of interest,” he recalled. He had no desire, then or later, to let the facts get in the way of a good story.

A Morning Call sketch published Aug. 23, 1864, gives some sense of why Twain failed to cut it as a newsman — and why he went on to bigger literary things. The article, bearing the world-class headline “Inexplicable News From San José,” records a well-lubricated pleasure jaunt to the south that Twain made with seven other San Francisco newspapermen. Pretending to be a pillar of journalistic rectitude, Twain claims to have received a drunken letter describing the junket.

He piously intones, “The very first paragraph in this blurred and scrawling letter pictured our friend’s condition, and filled us with humiliation. It was abhorrent to us to think that we, who had so well earned and so proudly borne the appellation of ‘M.T., The Moral Phenomenon,’ should live to have such a letter addressed to us. It begins thus: ‘Mr. Mark Twain — Sir: Sarrozay’s beautiful place. Flowers — or maybe it’s me — smells delishs — like sp-sp-sp (ic!) irits turpentine. Hiccups again. Don’ mind them — had ’em three days.’ As we remarked before, it is very humiliating.”

Even by the elastic standards that prevailed then, this sort of “reporting” was bound to draw the disapproving eye of Twain’s editor. Worse, Twain was so bored he “became about worthless” as a newsman. After four months, Twain knew that he was “a fading and perishing reporter.” Sure enough, he was asked to resign.

“It hurts yet,” Twain mused about the experience, in 1906, four years before his death.

Broke and humiliated, Twain hid from everyone he knew and practiced “slinking.” “I felt meaner, and lowlier and more despicable than the worms,” he recalled.

Twain headed with a pal to a place called Jackass Hill, near the Gold Rush town of Angels Camp. There he heard a tall tale about a jumping frog. When he returned to San Francisco three months later, he decided to write a story about it. “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog” (later retitled “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County”) was an instant sensation. The mandarins of the East Coast roared with laughter and delight. The success of “Jumping Frog” finally convinced Twain that his future lay as a writer. Near the end of his stay in San Francisco, Twain penned a letter to his brother Orion and Orion’s wife, Mollie.

“I have had a ‘call’ to literature, of a low order — i.e. humorous,” Twain wrote. “It is nothing to be proud of, but it is my strongest suit.”

Robert Hirst, editor of the Mark Twain Project, calls it the most important letter Twain ever wrote.

Twain had launched himself into the river, and it would carry him on to immortality.

Gary Kamiya is the author of “Shadow Knights: The Secret War Against Hitler.”

This article also appears in the Bay Area edition of The New York Times.