Quiet is the first thing you notice upon entering the Mark Twain Papers & Project, housed on the fourth floor of The Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley. A reverent hush permeates the hallway that leads past offices and research rooms to the climate-controlled vault. Inside are tens of thousands of items chronicling the life and work of literary titan Mark Twain (1835-1910).
Just beyond the vault is the office of the man who has presided over this archive — widely known as the MTP — for 45 years. Bob Hirst, the project’s general editor, sits in a swivel chair surrounded by stacks of papers and books that attest to his decades tending a literary legacy. Despite devoting his career to a single author, his passion has never waned.
“Sometimes I compare this work to what it’s like to have someone who’s a lifelong friend,” he said. “Do you stop learning things about that friend? I don’t think so. I think if you’re attentive, people are infinite. And what’s more, they change. We used to joke around here, we’re pretty sure Mark Twain is not writing any more letters. But we are still seeing letters that we’ve never seen before.”
This month, Hirst stepped gingerly into retirement. His decadeslong paper trail of publications reflects his stature as one of the world’s foremost Twain experts. With Hirst at the helm, the MTP has produced more than 30 authoritative volumes of Twain’s writings, from letters to fiction to travelogues. Meticulously researched and annotated, the volumes are packed with primary source documentation and lauded by scholars and students worldwide. Hirst also regularly earns plaudits for his generosity in supporting others’ research.
“Bob Hirst has transformed the Mark Twain Papers into what it is today: the world’s largest archive of materials by and about Mark Twain, and home to the most comprehensive scholarly edition of Twain’s writings ever undertaken,” wrote Kate Donovan, the director of The Bancroft Library, in a message announcing Hirst’s retirement.
Hirst’s career-defining achievement was the MTP’s work on the Autobiography of Mark Twain, published by University of California Press in three volumes (in 2010, 2013, and 2015). The first installment, released on the 100th anniversary of Twain’s death, sold more than 500,000 copies and appeared on the New York Times bestseller list for 16 weeks.
“This is a scholarly edition,” Hirst deadpanned. “This is not something that you, you know, put by your bedside. Maybe you give it to your grandfather.”
Getting it right
Long before shepherding the heralded edition to publication, Hirst was a doctoral student in UC Berkeley’s Department of English. It was the late 1960s, and he hadn’t yet found his niche in the program. Deemed to be progressing too slowly, he lost a coveted teaching assistantship and needed a new job. In 1967, he applied to be a proofreader at a fledgling project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities that was tasked with producing scholarly editions of Twain’s work.
Hirst found his home. His self-described obsessive tendencies were finally put to use, something that hadn’t happened in his doctoral work. He and his fellow proofreaders — mostly graduate students earning about $2 an hour — taught themselves how to edit, doggedly combing through primary sources to ensure accuracy.
One skill Hirst learned early on was to read Twain’s cancellations (words or phrases the author crossed out). Twain used a looping line to strike out text. Trained readers can often discern the words beneath, revealing illuminating details. This is important for Twain, who Hirst said liked to play with cancellations, often scratching out something he clearly intended the reader to see.
Hirst wrote his dissertation on Twain’s 1869 book, The Innocents Abroad, and completed his doctorate in 1976. By then, he’d spent nearly a decade at the MTP. He loved the work but felt the project hadn’t reached its full potential. After a three-year stint teaching at UCLA, Hirst returned to the project with a chance to prove his point. He became general editor in 1980, intent on acquiring more materials and organizing the existing archive for public access.
“I had been immersed in it enough to know that there was an enormous opportunity to do it right,” he said. “And to do it generously and in a way that everyone would benefit from.”
One of his first decisions as general editor startled colleagues. Three volumes of Twain’s letters were in the final proofing stage. But Hirst felt the editing was flawed, mainly because it had been rushed. After two years of trying to “correct” the letters, Hirst scrapped the volumes and had the staff start over. It wasn’t a popular decision.
But for Kerry Driscoll, an associate editor at the project, the decision speaks to Hirst’s “quiet insistence on rigorous accuracy.”
“He … established a benchmark for editorial excellence that has become a cornerstone of the Mark Twain Papers’ reputation,” she said.
For his part, Hirst cannot imagine doing the job differently. “If you want to know what the truth is, if you want to know the reality, you have to be as careful as you can,” he said. “Because there are lots of things in the way of your understanding. And that’s sort of the motive behind what I’m doing. I’m not a literary critic. I don’t publish essays about the new meaning of Huckleberry Finn. I may have some ideas about that, but what I’m doing is trying to make the evidence that everyone ought to have available.”
That commitment included bringing Twain’s work into the digital age. Hirst spearheaded the creation of the Mark Twain Project Online, which launched in 2007, a collaborative initiative intended to provide free access to fully annotated digital editions of everything Twain wrote.
Hirst also pioneered another key innovation in making Twain’s work more accessible to general audiences: plain text transcription. The editing style meticulously reproduces the appearance of Twain’s original manuscripts and reveals how the author understood them. Twain, who was trained as a typesetter, used typographical symbols to signal his stylistic preferences. The plain text method has since been adopted by other scholarly editorial projects.
Generous custodian
If you pass The Bancroft Library early in the morning, you might spot Hirst picking up trash on campus. It’s a ritual he’s had for years, which was originally his way of securing a good parking spot and getting in some steps before the library opened.
“I suppose it seems very eccentric, but in a way it’s not,” he said. “It’s just trying to keep our lovely campus from being a garbage bin.”
The university’s facilities department gave Hirst an award for his volunteerism. But he’s simply being himself — a careful custodian. That generosity extends to his work.
Driscoll met Hirst at a conference in 2005. At the time, she was teaching English at a Connecticut college and working on her book Mark Twain among the Indians and Other Indigenous Peoples (UC Press, 2018). She visited the archive at Hirst’s invitation and wound up doing most of her research there. Hirst served as her guide. Driscoll, who joined the project staff in 2019, still marvels at his generosity.
“If an email comes in from someone he doesn’t know, … he’ll drop everything in order to answer that person’s query,” she mused. “That has made him universally beloved. So many books, if you were to look at a shelf of studies on Mark Twain, in the acknowledgments, the person who is thanked first and foremost is Bob.”
Hirst has also given generously to the broader community, delivering more than 300 speeches, talks, and lectures over his career.
As you might expect, retirement won’t slow Hirst down. He’ll keep an office at the MTP and is excited to finish his scholarly edition of The Innocents Abroad — a fitting capstone to his distinguished career.
There is still much work ahead for the MTP team. Hirst cites Twain’s letters as an example. Two or three are still discovered each week. The author, compulsive about correspondence, is estimated to have written 50,000 letters; the project has accounted for about 14,000.
Of all his achievements, Hirst is proudest of securing sustainable funding for the MTP, which protects its most vital resource: the staff.
“I couldn’t have done anything without them,” he said, likening the project to a scholarly lab, where staff challenge and refine one another’s work, gradually improving each edition.
Most people, Hirst added, don’t realize that the project’s work is funded largely through grants and private gifts.
Roger Samuelsen ’58, J.D. ’64 has helped raise some of those funds. The chair of the Mark Twain Luncheon Club Board of Directors got involved with the MTP when members from the Class of 1958 raised more than $1 million as part of their 50th reunion to sustain the project’s work.
“With future NEH grants now in question, support from private sources is more important than ever,” Samuelsen said, “not only to sustain Bob’s legacy but to build upon that legacy by publishing annotated and critical editions of the thousands of still-unpublished manuscripts, letters, newspaper and magazine articles, and essays Twain wrote.”
In the end, that’s what matters most to Hirst, too: the quiet, exacting work.
“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been told: Go faster, do less, make it cost less,” he said. “I understand where that’s coming from. But it really is something you need to resist, up to a point. People used to say to me, ‘You never compromise.’ Well, no, I compromise all the time. It’s just that I try to make the compromises as small as possible. So you’re thinking of me as stubborn? Yeah. I’m stubborn. I think that’s almost the formula for what you have to do.”