Mark Twain Project

The Mark Twain Project has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities since 1976, and is the recipient of numerous grants totaling $10 million. 

Based at the University of California, Berkeley’s Bancroft Library, the project seeks to complete and publish—both in print and electronically on its website, Mark Twain Project Online (MTPO)—authoritative, fully annotated critical editions of everything written by American author, essayist, and humorist, Mark Twain.

In 2010, 100 years after Twain’s death (in accordance with the author’s wishes), the project published the first volume of Mark Twain’s autobiography. This collection of never-before-seen anecdotes and reminiscences, written over a 35-year span, became an instant best-seller. Among the challenges for editors in completing the Autobiography was that Twain, who had dictated rather than written most of its contents, had never assembled the materials into a publishable form or structure. Read more about the making of Twain’s Autobiography at NEH’s Humanities magazine. Since then, the Mark Twain Project has completed and published Twain’s complete three-volume Autobiography, supported by $2.3 million in NEH funding.

To date, the Mark Twain Project has edited and published more than 30 of an estimated 70 volumes of Twain’s manuscripts, letters, and other personal writings with the University of California Press. These include critical texts of major works such as Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, and Roughing It. The project’s digital portal, Mark Twain Project Online— built with an NEH Digital Infrastructure Challenge Grant—offers the edited texts of more than 2,000 letters and several book-length writings, including the Autobiography of Mark Twain, as well as a catalog of all Twain’s known correspondence. Visitors to in-construction site and previous version of the Mark Twain Project Online can browse some of Twain’s early journalism, speeches from his lectures, book contracts, letters written between 1853 and 1879, and family photographs.