Robert H. Hirst was born in 1941 in New York City and raised in Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y., just 20 miles upstream from the Big Apple. He attended public school in Hastings, took his B.A. in English from Harvard in 1963, then came to the English Department at UC Berkeley for his real education. He took an M.A. in American literature from Cal in 1965, and eventually his Ph.D in 1976. His dissertation was The Making of The Innocents Abroad, directed by the late Henry Nash Smith. To support himself in graduate school he worked as a teaching assistant for two years, but lost that job when he failed to pass his German reading exam in a timely way. So in 1967 he took a job as a proofreader and checker in the Mark Twain Papers, where he worked for the rest of his time in graduate school, gradually learning the craft of scholarly editing (something not taught in graduate school, at least not then and not at Berkeley).

He did eventually pass his German and earn his doctorate, and in 1976 he joined the English Department at UCLA as an assistant professor. From there he commuted regularly to the Mark Twain Papers in Berkeley where he was collaborating with Edgar M. Branch on several volumes of Mark Twain’s Early Tales & Sketches. Then in 1980 he became General Editor of the Mark Twain Project, so-called because it embraced two ongoing editions: the Mark Twain Papers in Berkeley and the Works of Mark Twain (begun at Iowa City). Under his leadership more than 20 volumes have since appeared, with many more still in the pipeline. The most recent volumes of Papers and Works have been described as an unmatched and probably unsurpassable pinnacle of editorial achievement . . . arguably the single greatest product of modern American editorial scholarship.

Hirst also became the official Curator of the Papers and has continuously added to the collection through both gifts and purchases. And, since 1996, he has taught one course a year in the Berkeley English Department, where he is an adjunct professor without pay, his favorite job title. He has been working on Mark Twain for thirty-five years, but contrary to recent reports, this long commitment has not caused him to begin to resemble his author, at least not to anyone but a very near-sighted person.

Hirst also claims never to have been in the least bored with his chosen subject: If you’re bored with Mark Twain, you either have no sense of humor, or you haven’t been paying attention.

The Mark Twain Project is housed in the Mark Twain Papers, a vast archive of the author’s personal manuscripts, letters, and documents which came to the UC Berkeley library in 1949. The Project set out in 1980 to produce a comprehensive scholarly edition of all Mark Twain’s writings estimated at seventy-five or eighty large volumes that were to include Mark Twain’s fifty notebooks, more than eleven thousand letters, eight file-feet of autobiography, hundreds of unpublished literary manuscripts, as well as critical, fully annotated editions of his twelve large books, thousands of magazine articles and stories, not to mention his uncollected newspaper journalism. Twenty-seven volumes of The Mark Twain Papers and Works of Mark Twain have been published by the University of California Press, which has also published nine volumes in The Mark Twain Library, a popular readers’ edition derived from the Papers and Works.

At the heart of this large enterprise are six professional editors, each with between 25 and 35 years experience in the Mark Twain archive. All but one of these editors are paid from soft money since 1967, usually in the form of grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). But NEH recently decided to put a time limit on its support for such projects, with the result that we now need to raise about $500,000 each year from private sources, just to hold this group of editors together.

So even though this Project is devoted to preserving and disseminating the works of what first lady Laura Bush recently called our very most important writer, the stark reality is that the editors who can best do the work will not survive to complete the edition without a major infusion of private funding sometime in the very near future

I'm very excited, and honored, to have the chance to work with Duane Carroll and the distinguished Contra Costa Wind Symphony on this program about Mark Twain. I'm delighted to have the chance to bring Mark Twain alive for a musical audience, and to bring whatever expertise I can to the words and the music of the Wind Symphony's performance.