The Trouble Begins: Looking Back, Looking Forward: Tales from the Mark Twain Papers and Project (In Person - Free)

Join MTP (Mark Twain Papers & Project) editor Kerry Driscoll for a lively, wide-ranging interview with Dr. Robert H. Hirst, the esteemed General Editor of the Mark Twain Papers and Project at the University of California, Berkeley from 1980 to 2025.  Bob, who biographer Ron Powers called “the best friend Mark Twain ever had,” will share stories about the rewards and challenges of a lifetime spent immersed in—and accurately editing—the writer’s letters and manuscripts. Whoever said archives were boring?
Born in New York City, Bob Hirst received his baccalaureate degree from Harvard in 1963. He then relocated to the Bay Area, entering the Ph.D. program in English at UC Berkeley. Bob began working in the Mark Twain Papers as a graduate student and completed his doctoral dissertation on “The Making of The Innocents Abroad: 1867–1876” under the supervision of Henry Nash Smith in 1976. In 1980, Bob was appointed General Editor of the Mark Twain Papers and Project, a position he held for forty-five years until his retirement in September 2025. During his distinguished decades-long tenure as General Editor, he shepherded over thirty authoritative critical editions of Mark Twain’s works into print, including three magisterial volumes of the writer’s Autobiography.
Kerry Driscoll, professor of English emerita at the University of St. Joseph in West Hartford, CT, is now an Associate Editor at the Mark Twain Papers and Project at the University of California, Berkeley. Kerry is a long-time Twain scholar and the author of Mark Twain among the Indians and Other Indigenous Peoples, the first book-length study of the writer’s vexed representations of Native peoples over the course of his fifty year career (UC Press, 2018). In 2022, she received the Mark Twain Circle of America’s Louis J. Budd Award for Distinguished Scholarship in recognition of the groundbreaking nature of her research. She has worked closely with the Mark Twain House and Museum for almost twenty years, and served on its Board of Trustees from 2017 to 2023.
This event is free to all. Reserve your spot HERE.