Mark Twain

“ I have dictated to a typewriter before--but not autobiography. Between that experience and the present one there lies a mighty gap --more than thirty years! It is sort of lifetime. In that wide interval much has happened--to the type-machine as well as to the rest of us. At the beginning of that interval a type-machine was a curiosity. The person who owned one was a curiosity, too. But now it is the other way about: the person who DOESN'T own one is a curiosity. I saw a type-machine for the first time in--what year? ”

“ Clemens replied that his best answer is the following chapter from his unpublished autobiography:
1904. VILLA QUARTO, FLORENCE, JANUARY.
Dictating autobiography to a typewriter is a new experience for me, but it goes very well, and is going to save time and "language" --the kind of language that soothes vexation. ”