Mark Twain wrote this long manuscript, which he left untitled, over a period of more than four months, from May to September 1909. Presumably among the last additions to the text was a separately paginated preface, “To the Unborn Reader,” which he signed “Mark Twain” and dated simply “1909, autumn.” Scholars have dubbed the text “The Ashcroft-Lyon Manuscript,” a title of convenience adopted here. It records in detail the events that led Clemens to dismiss, for malfeasance, Ralph W. Ashcroft (his business manager since 1907) and Isabel V. Lyon (his secretary and housekeeper, and then companion, since 1902). (Biographical information about Ashcroft and Lyon prior to 1909 may be found in the notes at 331.40, 332.35–36, 333.6–10, and 333.16, and in AutoMT2, 473 n. 27.22.)

Ashcroft and Lyon had married in March of 1909, a “queer event” (p. 340) that Clemens believed was merely a strategy to ensure their mutual loyalty and complicate any exposure of their duplicity. Before the first stirrings of trouble in 1908, Clemens had regarded both of them as practically members of the family, and by his own account had “absolute confidence in their honesty, their truthfulness, & their devotion” to him (p. 335). But after investigating allegations made by his daughter Clara, he concluded that Ashcroft was a liar and swindler who had—among other lesser misdeeds—tricked him into signing a power of attorney that “transferred all my belongings, down to my last shirt, to the Ashcrofts, to do as they pleased with” (p. 388). It was Lyon, however, who was the primary target of his anger. He came to believe that she had been stealing money from his household account, and had deceived him into paying for renovations to the “Lobster Pot,” the property near Stormfield that he had given her. Worse than these “thefts” was Lyon’s having conspired to keep his daughter Jean, who suffered from epilepsy, “exiled in dreary & depressing health-institutions a whole year & more after she was well enough to live at home without damage to her well-being” (p. 341). Lyon became in his eyes “a liar, a forger, a thief, a hypocrite, a drunkard, a sneak, a humbug, a traitor, a conspirator, a filthy-minded & salacious slut pining for seduction & always getting disappointed, poor child” (6 Mar 1910 to CC, ViU; for a discussion of how Lyon’s gender might have contributed to Clemens’s bitterness see Stoneley 1992, 149–58).

Sixty years elapsed between Mark Twain’s death and the first time modern scholars saw or read this manuscript. Paine doubtless read it, but because Clara wanted Isabel Lyon completely expunged from his account of her father’s life, he made little if any use of it.1 And the 433 leaves of manuscript were never part of the Mark Twain Papers, which the author placed under Paine’s and Clara’s supervision as his literary executors when he died in 1910.2 The manuscript was instead placed in the care of his attorney, Charles T. Lark, and then by Lark in the hands of Clemens’s executors, specifically Edward Eugene Loomis (1864–1937), the husband of Clemens’s niece Julia Olivia Langdon (1871–1948). Loomis evidently passed on the document to his business partner, Harold R. German. German died in March 1964 without leaving any instructions about what was to be done with it, and his daughter, Janet German Harbison Penfield, found it in a shoe box among other papers about to be destroyed. She recognized its importance, rescued it, and reasoned that Mark Twain must have given it to Edward Loomis, and that Loomis gave it to German, making her (Penfield) and her brother the rightful owners. In January 1970, through John S. Van E. Kohn of Seven Gables Bookshop, Penfield sold the manuscript to the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of the New York Public Library for $27,500. But her ownership of the manuscript, and therefore her right to sell it, were challenged successfully in 1972 by one of the daughters of Edward and Julia Loomis, Olivia Loomis Lada-Mocarski (1905–93), who maintained that her parents had never given the document to German, even though it was manifestly in his possession when he died, sixteen years after the death of her mother. The sale to the Berg Collection was rescinded, and the manuscript returned to Lada-Mocarski and her sister, Mrs. Bayard Schieffelin, who gave it to the Mark Twain Papers in March 1973.

Hamlin Hill was the first to study the manuscript while it was (briefly) at the Berg Collection. He made extensive use of it in Mark Twain: God’s Fool (1973). Hill found that “the Clemens family comes off more poorly than the Ashcrofts do in the ‘Ashcroft-Lyon Manuscript’; all three Clemenses were illogical and lacking in compassion; and Clara’s and Jean’s harassment of the defenseless and high-strung secretary and her mother was needlessly vicious. The manuscript is a geyser of bias, vindictiveness, and innuendo. It proceeds in no systematic order, and it ends with the quite irrelevant and almost irrational comment about Peary and Cook both discovering the North Pole” (Hill 1973, 231). Thirty years later Karen Lystra’s Dangerous Intimacy: The Untold Story of Mark Twain’s Final Years (2004) took a more generous view of the author while also distributing blame more evenly. Drawing on numerous documents not available to Hill, especially Jean’s diaries, to better judge the facts from different points of view, she also summarized the evidence from Clemens’s financial records to support the charge of dishonesty (Lystra 2004, xii–xiv). Laura Skandera Trombley, in Mark Twain’s Other Woman (2010), defends Lyon and described the manuscript as a “fiction about his family’s squabbles,” expressed in language that “could have been directly lifted from the melodramatic and sensational press.” She claimed that Clara, whose friendship with Lyon had turned to enmity, pressured Clemens to dismiss Lyon out of a “need for retribution,” and that both father and daughter feared what she would reveal about Clara’s relationship with the married Charles Wark (Trombley 2010, 205, 211, 216–17; see AD, 6 Oct 1908, note at 267.36–37). In the same year, Michael Shelden’s Mark Twain, Man in White: The Grand Adventure of His Final Years (2010) made a well-informed examination of the life from 1906 onward, and offered a corrective to the partisans of Miss Lyon.

Written as a letter (never to be sent) to William Dean Howells, the manuscript is the only known example of a “splendid scheme” which Clemens had recently “invented” as a better way than dictation to compose autobiography. He described the plan to Howells on 17 April 1909:

On 10 September 1909—three days after the last date that Clemens recorded in the manuscript—he, his daughters, and Paine signed a document releasing the Ashcrofts from all the debts for which Clemens had threatened to sue them (MiD). The Ashcrofts, for their part, dropped their threatened lawsuit for defamation of character. On that day Clemens noted in a memorandum, “Everything cleaned up & arranged with the Ashcrofts.” Ashcroft had presented a bill for services, which included the pay he was due for his work as manager of the Mark Twain Company: “His bill was for $8,000; he gets $1,000 & 6 months’ commission, beginning March 13 & ending Sept. 13 (say $750); & gives up 18 months’ commission . . . say $3,000. Resigned the management, by request, to keep from being thrown out. He required, as a condition of his resignation, a note of regret from me, & withdrawal of all my charges against Miss Lyon. Both refused. . . . On my side I get back the Lobster Pot.” On September 18 he added, “we are entirely rid of those thieves at last” (memorandum in CU-MARK). The final details were worked out on 26 September (19 and 27 Sept 1909 to Twichell, CtY-BR). Just a month before his death, Clemens summed up the sad affair in a letter to John Hays Hammond: “First & last, in one way & another, that putrescent pair cost me $50,000—& yet I have come out ahead. For they are tied together for life, & I was the unwitting reason of it” (22 Mar 1910 to Hammond, secretarial copy in CU-MARK).

Clara, however, had not heard the last of the Ashcrofts. In July 1910, only three months after Clemens’s death, the Ashcrofts tried to sell the manuscript of “Is Shakespeare Dead?” According to attorney Lark:

Just a few weeks later, Clara described the same incident in a letter to her friend Harriet E. Whitmore (Lyon’s quondam employer and friend):

So far as is known, this incident was the last time that Clara was threatened by the Ashcrofts. The other stolen manuscripts that she mentions have not been identified.

In 1913 the Ashcrofts moved to Montreal, where Ashcroft worked as advertising director for the Dominion Rubber Company. From 1916 to 1920 he held the same position with the United States Rubber Company, and as of 1920 they were living in Dobbs Ferry, New York, with Isabel’s mother. The couple separated in 1923 and divorced in 1927, and Ashcroft returned to Canada, where he later became the general manager of the Trans-Canada Broadcasting Company. He remarried, but Lyon remained single, living in a small apartment in New York’s Greenwich Village and working for twenty-five years for the Home Title Insurance Company in Brooklyn (“Business Leader Friend and Aide of Mark Twain,” Toronto Globe and Mail, 9 Jan 1947, 7; Westchester Census 1920, 1276:23B; Trombley 2010, 249; Lystra 2004, 265–66; Shelden 2010, 416–17).

Mark Twain’s manuscript, including the holographic, typed, and printed items he inserted into it, is transcribed in plain text, which aims to reproduce the original documents as fully and reliably as possible (see the Note on the Text). The symbols and conventions used in the transcription are defined in the list below. Textual aspects of the manuscript not susceptible to transcription are reported in the Textual Commentary at MTPO . Also recorded there are Clemens’s jottings in the margins of his manuscript—gnomic reminders that are not part of the narrative—and two pages of more extensive working notes. Several invoices annotated by Clemens, which could not be intelligibly transcribed, have been reproduced in facsimile. See the Appendix “Ashcroft-Lyon Chronology” for a summary of the events relevant to Clemens’s narrative.

a cance- deletions, make the $100,000	Cancellation is signified by a slash for a single character or by a horizontal strikethrough for two or more characters; canceled words within a passage or phrase that was then entirely canceled are indicated by a double rule.
marking it up	Insertion is signified by two carets enclosing one or more characters.
◇	A hollow diamond stands for a character that the editors have not been able to read.
Stormfield Believe	Words underscored once are transcribed in italic type, words with a wavy underscore are transcribed in boldface type—typographical conventions assumed by Clemens and other writers of the period.
ralph w. ashcroft	Extra-small small capitals with no initial capitals signify printed text, such as letterhead.
shaded words can be revised From letter in fact—unstrung	Gray background identifies text originated and inscribed or typed by someone other than Clemens; when Clemens made insertions, deletions, or underscores in such a text his changes appear without the gray background.
[note by CC:] [written in the margin: P. S. ] Mrs. Ashcroft[']s an[d] A[s]hcroft	Square brackets enclose editorial notes and text characterized or described; superscript or subscript brackets enclose words or characters unintentionally omitted by the writer and interpolated by the editors.
〚Some silence.〛	The author’s square brackets are transcribed thus to distinguish them from editorial brackets.
X	Ruled borders are an editorial convention to represent the edges of a newspaper clipping; boxed text is shown without a gray background.
sort, ‸over she bought . . . over‸	Text following ‘over’ (in small capital letters) was inscribed on the back of the manuscript leaf; a second ‘over’ (in small capital letters or in lowercase letters and placed on a separate line) signals that Clemens resumed writing on the front of the leaf; these additions are by definition insertions and are so marked with carets.
‸	Canceled caret
¶	Paragraph sign
X	Paraph