Mark Twain's Autobiography – Vol. I, published this year, is holding strong as #3 on The New York Times Best Seller List.

That's a notch above Keith Richards' autobiography, Life, a fact that Mark Twain would doubtless savor were he alive today.

But all is not sweetness for the legacy of the celebrated Mr. Twain, who put an embargo on publication of his official autobiography — to be released in three volumes — delaying the first volume's release until 100 years after his death. Mark Twain died in Redding on April 21, 1910.

(Twain wished the second volume of his autobiography to be published 25 years after the first and the third volume to be published 25 years after the second.)

The embargo was in keeping with his savvy sense of self-promotion. He aspired to be an immortal and in this way he guaranteed revived consideration of his life and ouevre after he was long gone.

Moreover, he died with a sense of assurance that he had put his affairs in good order.

Little could he have appreciated, then, that the delayed pubication would meet with excoriating reviews, contempt even, nor that unpleasant revelations of his personal life would be exposed by scholars, his reputation diminished by leaps and bounds.

The book is "a wonderful fraud," declared Garrison Keiller in a review in The New York Times on Dec. 16. "Here is a powerful argument for writers' burning their papers."

"It is the sad fate of an icon to be mummified alive, pickled by his own reputation," writes Keiller.

"If not exactly a deliberate swindle, it is an endlessly repeated put-on, a shaggy-dog story without a punch line," echoed Adam Gopnik, writing in the Nov. 29 New Yorker.

Gopnik correctly points out that the autobiography has actually been edited and published three times before; all that's new are fragments of letters and unfinished manuscripts.

"A book that had been a disjointed and largely baffling bore emerges now as a disjointed and largely baffling bore," writes Gopnik.

As if these harsh words weren't enough, 2010 also marked the year of publication of Mark Twain's Other Woman, a studiously researched exploration of scandal, intrigue and deceptions in the Twain household by Laura Skandera Trombley.

Isabel V. Lyon is the central non-fiction character in Mark Twain's final 427-word manuscript which he penned furiously from his bed at Stormfield, his Italianate villa above Redding Glen, in the last year of his life. She was a jill-of-all-trades, tending to Twain's correspondence, overseeing the construction and decoration of Stormfield and fluffing his mane of white hair when called upon.

Twain took special pains to see that the "Ashcroft Lyon Manuscript," a rambling, vitriolic attack on Lyon, would never be published.

Alas, fate was not so kind.

Twain entrusted the manuscript to Clara, his only daughter of three who survived him, with instructions to use it for legal leverage should certain persons appear after his death to make mischief on his reputation.

Unfortunately for Twain, Clara was careless with the manuscript and it ended up in the Mark Twain Papers at the University of California at Berkeley, available to scholars and others.

The manuscript serves as the starting-off point for Trombley's remarkable sleuthing of the most intimate aspects of Twain's final years, his relationship with Clara and the construction of the persona he presented to the world.

Twain prized above all else his reputation as a scrupulously dutiful family man surrounded by adoring daughters.

Isabel Lyon earned Twain's fury when she discovered that Clara, whose singing career Twain subsidized, was carrying on an affair with her married pianist – and putting him up in hotels for assignations with Twain's money.

Twain could not tolerate the thought of being laughed at. According to Trombley's account, he hastily arranged for Clara to marry someone she did not love and for Lyon to marry someone she did not love, to cover up the whole tawdry mess.

It's the stuff of fiction stranger than the Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.

Isabel V. Lyon did not win a mention when Twain's autobiography was first published in the 1920s. Time will tell if she makes an appearance in the new, official autobiography. We'll find out in 2035 or 2060.