Mark Twain Project Online has no plans to include Is Shakespeare Dead? From My Autobiography

Title page: Is Shakespeare Dead: From My Autobiography by Mark Twain, 1909

by Linda Theil

A major project involving creating a digital critical edition, fully annotated, of everything Mark Twain wrote should include at least the names of all the author's published works, but after twenty years of toil, The Mark Twain Project Online has no plans to even mention Is Shakespeare Dead? From My Autobiography by Mark Twain -- a book published by Harper & Brothers Publishing in 1909, a year before the author's demise.

Oberon addressed this topic in a 2016 post titled "Mark Twain's benighted book" featuring background information about the Mark Twain Project Online and the absence of Is Shakespeare Dead? From My Autobiography from the project site.

Nine years later, we still find no mention of Is Shakespeare Dead? From My Autobiography on the Mark Twain Project Onlline. When we queried the site regarding this omission, we received the following information from Associate Editor Benjamin Griffin of the Mark Twain Project at the Bancroft Library, University of Califormia in Berkeley on January 17, 2025:

"Is Shakespeare Dead isn't part of the Autobiography as published by the Mark Twain Project in 2010-2015.

"The final form of the autobiography is, in part, a matter of analysis and conjecture. When Harriet Elinor Smith and I edited the California edition, we were satisfied with the evidence that, by late March 1909, Clemens had ceased to think of the completed Is Shakespeare Dead? as a part of his autobiography, and had come to conceive it as a separate work.

"Clemens excluded Is Shakespeare Dead? from the sequence of typescripts which he designated as the final form of the autobiography. Elsewhere in these typescripts, when he wanted long manuscripts or extraneous matter inserted, he was punctilious about instructing his amanuenses where these were to go; he also had his amanuenses revise and re-revise the typescript page sequence(s) of the whole. None of the manuscripts and typescripts of Is Shakespeare Dead? show the revisions or repaginations that would imply insertion of the work into the continuous autobiography sequence.

"On 25 March 1909 Clemens made an autobiographical "dictation" (really a manuscript) beginning: "About two months ago I was illuminating this Autobiography with some notions of mine concerning the Bacon-Shakspeare controversy ..." (AutoMT3,Is Shakespeare Dead?. If that material had been part of "this Autobiography," he would have dropped some form of cross-reference or order to insert; instead he says nothing: suggesting that the two projects had diverged." End quote

Oberon subsequently asked if Is Shakespeare Dead: From My Autobiography is on the project's schedule for publication, and when they anticipate that the book will be available on the site, Griffin replied on January 18, 2025: 

"We haven't done an edition of Is Shakespeare Dead, so it isn't on our site. The MT Project is a work in progress. Right now we are editing The Innocents Abroad and Following the Equator. And continuing with the Letters... 

Griffin added:
"You can read the first edition of Is Shakespeare Dead? at 
https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=fK4NAAAAYAAJ&rdid=book-fK4NAAAAYAAJ&rdot=1&pli=1

In a separate note on the same day, Griffin said: "It isn't part of the work to be done on our current grant, and I'm not sure what the future holds for our Project."