e, "laying all hideousness
utterly bare, reserving nothing. Banish the idea of the audience and all
hampering things."

Orion, out in Keokuk, had long since abandoned the chicken farm and
a variety of other enterprises. He had prospected insurance, mining,
journalism, his old trade of printing, and had taken down and hung up
his law shingle between each of these seizures. Aside from business,
too, he had been having a rather spectacular experience. He had changed
his politics three times (twice in one day), and his religion as many
more. Once when he was delivering a political harangue in the street,
at night, a parade of the opposition (he had but just abandoned them)
marched by carrying certain flaming transparencies, which he himself
had made for them the day before. Finally, after delivering a series of
infidel lectures; he had been excommunicated and condemned to eternal
flames by the Presbyterian Church. He was therefore ripe for any new
diversion, and the Autobiography appealed to him. He set about it with
splendid enthusiasm, wrote a hundred pages or so of his childhood with
a startling minutia of detail and frankness, and mailed them to his
brother for inspection.

They were all that Mark Twain had expected; more than he had expected.
He forwarded them to Howells with great satisfaction, suggesting, with
certain excisions, they be offered anonymously to the Atlantic readers.

But Howells's taste for realism had its limitations. He found the story
interesting--indeed, torturingly, heart-wringingly so--and, advising
strongly against its publication, returned it.

Onion was steaming along at the rate of ten to twenty pages a day now,
forwarding them as fast as written, while his courage was good and the
fires warm. Clemens, receiving a package by every morning mail, soon
lost interest, then developed a hunted feeling, becoming finally
desperate. He wrote wildly to shut Orion off, urging him to let his
manuscript accumulate, and to send it in one large consignment at the
end. This Orion did, and it is fair to say that in this instance at
least he stuck to his work faithfully to the bitter, disheartening end.
And it would have been all that Mark Twain had dreamed it would be, had
Orion maintained the simple narrative spirit of its early pages. But
he drifted off into theological byways; into discussions of his
excommunication and infidelities, which were frank enough, but lacked
human interest.

In old age Mar