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The cover of the new Twain autobiography. Click to see full-size.

Harriet Elinor Smith, lead editor of the six-year-long effort to create the first volume of Mark Twain's unexpurgated autobiography, would like to correct some misconceptions. First, readers should not expect thousands of pages of unseen, scandalous material: even though Twain did famously embargo his memoir for a century to speak freely about his contemporaries, he did not pen a tell-all confessional. "That's gotten exaggerated to the point where we're accused of false advertising," Smith said. "He did in fact put an embargo on the book, but for different reasons at different time frames."

His material on Christianity, for instance, was to be withheld for 500 years, but even during his lifetime, Twain broke or changed the rules on this. And with three previously published versions of the memoir, his appointed biographer, Albert Bigelow Paine, and his daughter Clara "certainly printed things that [Twain] wanted withheld."

And then there's the quality of the unpublished bits. "To be honest, various editors didn't think it was his best work," Smith said. "We had no intention of implying that this was a work that has been censored for 100 years."

But there are some great reasons why this 700-page book sits atop best-seller lists before it even is scheduled to hit bookstores. For starters, Twain's dictation method — Smith and her team assembled the book from transcriptions of dictations written by his stenographer, all designed to be non-chronological wanderings through his life — gives the book a stream-of-consciousness feel that is meant to be experienced in full.

Like other Twain editorial innovations, this technique didn't have a strong precedent in his time. "He doesn't refer to anyone doing anything like this, and we don't know of any diarist or autobiographer adopting this form," said Smith. "Even in 'Huck Finn,' he'd write for a while and then put it aside and the tank would fill up again and he'd write some more. He's that kind of writer. His 'systemless system' suited him perfectly."

Of course, putting together the bits and pieces of the "systemless system" is less fun for an editor than for the writer himself. Smith, who has been doing Twain-related work for 33 years, began collating material about six years ago.

As part of the federally funded Mark Twain Project, Smith approached the task as a scholar. One of her first challenges was creating a kind of stylebook for the memoir, to establish some consistency across all the decades of versions and pieces of the autobiography spread across magazines and published as books. "One of the editorial challenges was asking, ‘Is this a softening or literary improvement?’” she said, speaking of Twain's own editing of the memoir for the parts published in magazines during his time. Some news stories implied that Smith used software to help sort through the text: she would like to refute that. Her team used WordPerfect, typing everything into the computer by hand.

There is a piece of technology, though, that does make this project possible. Because of all the annotations necessary to explain why Smith made the decisions she did — spellings of certain words, rejection of certain previous revisions — publishing a scholarly version of the book would be prohibitively expensive. By choosing to put the "textual apparatus" online, though, the whole project became possible. (Two editors worked full-time on the digital edition; Smith said that she essentially worked with four people to get the bulk of the memoir finished.)

What, then, did Smith learn about Twain in the course of poring over his papers? "l always knew he was the master of the creative insult, but I didn't anticipate how many people he had nasty things to say about, and how many amusing and creative ways of saying it," she said, laughing. While nothing truly salacious comes out — Smith dismisses reports that Twain writes about using a vibrator for sexual purposes or details an affair with his secretary as "hogwash," saying "If you knew Mark Twain like I do, you'd know he'd never do that" — there are other kinds of relevations.

"He did have a tendency to feel guilty that we find puzzling. He claims that he never told anyone, but he did in fact tell his sister-in-law, that he was the cause of his son's death," Smith said. Apparently, when Twain was riding in a carriage, he got lost in thought and noticed only too late that his young son Langdon was exposed to the cold — the reason, he writes, that Langdon eventually died of diphtheria. He also talks about a deep regret that he didn't allow his wife Olivia to visit old friends in Scotland in the early 1870s. "She desperately wanted to see them," Smith said. "He just refused, and they never saw them again. Looking back, he recalls how selfish he was, that sort of thing," she said.

Even while reflecting on humbling moments, though, Twain remains a self-interested raconteur. With a great deal of affection, Smith opined that his main impetus in putting together his memoirs was that "he loved hearing himself talk."

"He was, in a way, narcissistic," she said, "and we're so lucky that he was."