Mark Twain's memoirs

If you can not publish something while you are alive, why would you publish it 100 years after your death? It is difficult to fathom.
Mark Twain's scandalous relationship with his "filthy-minded and salacious" secretary is to be revealed in memoirs published 100 years after the author's death. The unedited 5,000 page autobiography, which Twain refused to make public during his lifetime, will bare his feelings for Isabel Van Kleek Lyon.
The book is likely to shatter the myth that America's great writer and humourist was a cheerful old man, instead detailing his petty rages and uncomplimentary views of contemporaries.
Before his death in 1910, Twain decreed that his full manuscript should not be published for a century so that he would be "dead" and unaware and indifferent and could speak his "whole frank mind." There's this popular conception of him being carved out of marble and pure. But he smoked an average of 300 cigars a month, and he drank every day. He was a very sexual person.
The autobiography is to be published in three volumes by the University of California, Berkeley, which holds the documents in a vault. The first will be released to coincide with the 175th anniversary of Twain's birth on November 30.
Historians say his autobiography could cast him a new light, detailing personal scores he wanted to settle, uncomplimentary views of contemporaries and his religious and political convictions.
One wonders why Twain was willing to have himself cast in this very different light. Was it that he could not see how it would change people's views of him. If he waited 100 years for the publication of the work, he must have understood that there were concerns.
Interesting how time and new information changes our views of people.