Mark Twain had been a celebrity for a good many years before he could be persuaded to regard himself as anything more than an accident, a news-writer to whom distinction had come as a matter of good fortune rather than as a tribute to genius. Sooner or later his "vein" would be worked out, when he would of necessity embark in other pursuits.
He had already owned a newspaper, and experimented more or less casually--and unfortunately--with a variety of other enterprises, when in 1884 he capitalized a publishing concern, primarily to produce his own works, but not without a view to the establishment of something more dependable than authorship. It probably never occurred to him during those years that he had achieved anything like a permanent place in literary history; if the idea of an autobiography had intruded itself now and then, it had not seriously troubled him.