Thanks to his novels, Mark Twain will always be thought of first as the scribe of the Mississippi. But Twain's best work doesn't end on the river.
His accounts of his travels in California stand as founding documents of the literature of the American West. And so it seems only fitting that Twain's collected papers would finally come to rest at UC Berkeley's Bancroft Library.
Mark Twain
The men who ushered the Twain collection west were themselves pioneers of literary scholarship beyond the parochial confines of New England and the Ivy League. After the death of Twain's official biographer, Albert Bigelow Paine, in 1937, the massive collection of manuscripts, scrapbooks, letters, photographs, and other documents came under the care of Bernard DeVoto at the Houghton Library of Harvard University. But DeVoto was no Boston Brahmin. Born in Utah in 1897 to a Mormon mother and Catholic father, he became one of the most visible literary raconteurs of his time. His novels and essays reflected an obsessive ambivalence toward the American frontier that found a provocative antecedent in Twain, about whom he published a book of criticism, Mark Twain's America that stirred controversy and made his name.
From DeVoto, the Twain collection passed to Dixon Wecter at the Henry E. Huntington Library in San Marino. Wecter, born in Houston, was a Rhodes Scholar who served as a professor of English at UCLA before joining the Huntington, first as member and then as chairman of the library's research staff. Also a Guggenheim Fellow, Wecter became an innovator in the field of American social history, writing on the grand themes of American expansion. He came to UC Berkeley in 1949 as Margaret Byrne Professor of United States History and brought the Twain papers with him. They have remained on campus ever since.
Today more and more of the Twain collection continues to become available on the Internet. A team of curators headed by Robert H. Hirst, in collaboration with scholars worldwide, have assembled a massive working archive of photocopies and transcriptions of rare and valuable papers. The Twain team has edited and published authoritative critical editions of Twain's novels and non-fiction. It also assembles regular exhibitions of selected items from the collection showcasing Twain's prolific range as a thinker and observer of American life.
– Marcus Wohlsen