It includes a brief introduction describing the evolution of Mark Twain’s ideas about writing his autobiography, as well as a chronology of his life, brief family biographies, and an excerpt from the forthcoming Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 2—a controversial but characteristically humorous attack on Christian doctrine.The year 2010 marked the 100th anniversary of Mark Twain’s death. In celebration of this important milestone and in honor of the cherished tradition of publishing Mark Twain’s works, UC Press published Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1, the first of a projected three-volume edition of the complete, uncensored autobiography. The book became an immediate bestseller and was hailed as the capstone of the life’s work of America’s favorite author.Read an excerpt here: Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1:The Complete and Authoritative Edition by Mark Twain by University of California Press

    To protect himself and those he loved from street violence, Andre learned to use his fists so well that he was even scared of himself. He was on a fast track to getting killed - or killing someone else. He signed on as a boxer. Nearby, his father, an eminent author, taught on a college campus and took the kids out on Sundays. The clash of worlds couldn't have been more stark - or more difficult for a son to communicate to a father. Only by becoming a writer himself could Andre begin to bridge the abyss and save himself. His memoir is a riveting, visceral, profound meditation on physical violence and the failures and triumphs of love.

    From its dawn in the 1660s to its twilight in the 1960s, Cliveden was an emblem of elite misbehaviour and intrigue. Conceived by the Duke of Buckingham as a retreat for his scandalous affair with Anna-Maria, Countess of Shrewsbury, the house later served as the backdrop for the Profumo Affair, which would bring down a government and change the course of British history.In the three hundred years between the Countess and Christine Keeler, the house was occupied by a dynasty of remarkable women: Elizabeth Villiers, an intellectual who brokered the rise and fall of governments; Augusta of Saxe-Gotha, a minor German royal who almost became queen of England; Harriet Duchess of Sutherland, the glittering society hostess turned political campaigner; and Nancy Astor, the consummate controversialist who became the first woman to take a seat in parliament. Under the direction of these women, Cliveden provided a stage for political plots and artistic premieres, hosted grieving monarchs and republican radicals, was idealised as a family home, and maligned as a threat to national security.The Mistresses of Cliveden is by turns a historical epic, a political thriller, a family drama, and an intimate history of the relationships between people and place. Above all, it is a story about sex and power, and the ways in which exceptional women have evaded, exploited, and confronted the expectations of their times.

    It wasn't the rough-riding new president, Teddy Roosevelt, but his outrageous and outrageously charming teenage daughter, Alice. From the moment she strode into town- carrying a snake and dangling a cigarette- to the image of her seven decades later, entertaining Republican and Democrat presidents in Washington's most celebrated salon, Alice Roosevelt Longworth was literally a legend in her own time. This new biography-the first in twenty years- is a richly entertaining portrait of America's most memorable first daughter. Alice in fact strode across the whole twentieth century, living her entire life on the political stage and in the public eye, earning the nickname "the other Washington monument." She grew up knowing Civil war veterans, lived through two world wars, helped put the roar in the Roaring Twenties, and campaigned against her cousin Franklin's New Deal. Smoking, gambling, and dressing flamboyantly, she flouted social connections and opened the door for other women to do the same. Her barbed tongue was infamous, but whenever she talked, powerful people listened, as she was one of the most astute political minds of her age. She advised her father; her husband, Nicholas Longworth, who was the Speaker of the House, and her lover William Borah, the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the most powerful man in Washington. Using love letters and other documents disclosed for the first time, Stacy Cordery provides scandalous proof of the real father of Alice's child as well as evidence of her other previously unknown love affairsAlice Roosevelt Longworth was for eight decades the social doyenne in a town where socializing was state business. Politicians, diplomats, journalists, and the famous and infamous of every stripe clamored to be invited to her teas. Meetings in her drawing room helped to change the course of history, from undermining the Leagues of Nations to boosting Richards Nixon's fortunes.

    A unique memoir of the first half of the twentieth century as seen through the eyes of one born to be an absolute monarch, the book begins with the author's vivid account of the last, decadent days of the Ching Dynasty, and closes with an introspective self-portrait of the last Ching emperor transformed into a retiring scholar and citizen of the People's Republic of China.In detailing the events of the fifty years between his ascension to the throne and the final period of his life as a quiet-living resident of Beijing, Pu Yi reveals himself to be first and foremost a survivor, caught up in the torrent of global power struggles and world conflict that played itself out on the Asian continent through many decades of violence and upheaval.The firsthand description of the dramatic events of Pu Yi's life was the basis for the internationally acclaimed 1987 Bernardo Bertolucci film The Last Emperor which was named Best Picture of the Year by the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. From Emperor to Citizen readily lends itself to cinematic adaptation as a personal narrative of continuously significant and revealing episodes.Becoming emperor and then forced to abdicate with the establishment of the Republic of China in 1911, all before he is seven years old, Pu Yi continues to live in the Forbidden City for another decade, still treated as the Son of Heaven by the moribund Ching court, but in reality a virtual prisoner with little genuine human contact apart from his beloved nurse Mrs. Wang, his teacher Chen Pao-shen and his English teacher Reginald Johnston.When at the age of nineteen Pu Yi is finally forced to vacate his isolated existence within the Forbidden City, he begins his long odyssey as the dependent of the occupying imperial Japanese regime, first in Tientsin, and eventually installed as "emperor" of the Japanese puppet state styled Manchukuo in China's northeast provinces. With the defeat of Japan and the end of the Second World War, Pu Yi faces a very uncertain future as he is shunted off to Russia for five years before returning to a new China transformed by revolution, where he is confined in the Fushun War Criminal Prison. Here he undergoes several years of rehabilitation, "learning how to become a human being," as he calls it, before receiving an official pardon and being allowed to finally live as an ordinary citizen of Beijing.This autobiography is the culmination of a unique and remarkable life, told simply, directly and frankly by a man whose circumstances and experiences were like no other.