In the final volume of his autobiography, Mark Twain reflects on unhappy times

The task of completing 'Autobiography of Mark Twain” takes a powerful heap of commitment. The three-volume total weighs in at 2,121 pages, not counting indexes.

Volume 1 of this University of California Press authoritative edition was published in 2010, 100 years after Sam Clemens's death, to much literary ballyhoo and significant sales. Volume 2 debuted three years later, to a bit less fanfare.

Now comes volume 3, in which one of the most famous writers in the English language, then and now, continues to ruminate on whatever crosses his mind, regardless of chronological order. See, that was his solution to compiling an autobiography of his justifiably legendary life. Rather than being shackled to recounting what happened since birth, in 1835, one foot in front of the other in what he found to be a tiresome format, he determined to dictate his adventures, diverse opinions and random - in the true, non-millennial sense of the word - thoughts in darned-well whatever order they occurred to him.

So in volume 3 Clemens resumes dishing admiration and jabs - sometimes both at the same person. He recalls President Theodore Roosevelt ('Wild creatures often do extraordinary things. Look at Mr. Roosevelt's own performances”), his friend industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie (a 'smiley and complacent little man!”) and Charles Dickens ('a small and slender figure, rather fancifully dressed”), among many other famous folk with whom he'd rubbed elbows.

And he once again dredges up that unsubstantiated nonsense that Francis Bacon wrote the works we've long believed to have been authored by William Shakespeare - a 'grossly commercial wool-stapler.” Which proves that even a genius can't be right about everything.

Yet much of this final volume is taken up recounting death, illness and other torments:

'I have been to Bermuda again,” he notes in 1908, when he was 73, '…

it is on account of bronchitis, my annual visit for these 17 or 18 years.”

Later that same year, Clemens recalls his 'long period of unrest and loneliness” after the death four years earlier of his beloved wife, Olivia. 'I was washing about on a forlorn sea of banquets and speech-making …

but got at my heart for an evening only, then left it dry and dusty.”

Many pages also are given over to the public squabbles involving his one-time secretary, Isabel Lyons. The writer, near the end of his life, angrily contends Lyons tried to seduce him after the death of Olivia and attempted to rob him.

(In her 2004 book on Mark Twain's later years, 'Dangerous Intimacy,” Karen Lystra writes that Lyons spread rumors through town that the boss' daughters, Clara and Jean, were to be kept away from Clemens because they were 'insane” and 'crazy,” respectively.)

It's nasty, sad celebrity gossip that wouldn't be out of place on the covers of today's tabloids and TV 'entertainment” programs.

If you want to read of happier topics - tales from the lighthearted creator of Tom Sawyer rather than the brooding father of Huck Finn, if you will - pick up volume 1. Volume 3, alas, though still the words of the master and offering more insight into his world view, are far less cheery.