Mainly the Truth: Interviews with Mark Twain is a collection of the most colorful and vivacious interviews that Mark Twain gave to newspapers and reporters throughout his career. A master storyteller and raconteur, Twain understood the value of publicity, and these interviews capture Twain both at his most lively and in moments of candor and introspection.
 
In his interviews, Twain discussed such topical issues as hazing and civil service reform, and more enduring concerns, such as his lecture style, his writings, government corruption, humor, his bankruptcy, racism, women’s suffrage, imperialism, international copyright, and his impressions of other writers (Howells, Gorky, George Bernard Shaw, Tennyson, Longfellow, Kipling, Hawthorne, Dickens, Bret Harte, among others). These interviews are both oral performances in their own right and a new basis for evaluating contemporary responses to Twain’s writings.