Oh, how we wish it actually was an interview with the man himself. But that’s okay. Authors Road obviously couldn’t interview Mark Twain—his schedule simply won’t permit it nowadays—but they were able to talk instead with Robert H. Hirst, General Editor of the Mark Twain Papers & Project.

Watch this Authors Road interview: Robert H. Hirst on Mark Twain, Novelist, Humorist and Journalist

More about Mark Twain:

To our knowledge, no author in history has managed to write and publish new, best sellers that span a career of nearly a century and a half. But Mark Twain has. His first short-story (1865), “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County”, is still read in schools today. And in 2010, the UC Berkeley Mark Twain Papers & Project published the first of three volumes of Twain’s critical edition autobiography – a monumental work that Twain embargoed from publishing for 100 years after his death. Granted, there have been several autobiographies published before this, but the materials those were drawn from were abridged and censored.

No one anticipated what would happen with this first volume. Initial plans were made for a print run of 2,000. Before a year was up over half-million copies were sold, and world demand was still going strong.

Watch this Authors Road interview: Robert H. Hirst on Mark Twain, Novelist, Humorist and Journalist