Mark Twain Online:About
About
MarkTwain.online is accessible for limited time by Twain scholars. It is searchable edition of David H. Fears's Mark Twain Day by Day, the most detailed chronology of Samuel L. Clemens's life ever assembled. This wiki turns Fears's four printed volumes into a living, linkable reference for project partipants to help build a final project (Digital Mark Twain Day by Day) that scholars, teachers, students, and "Twainiacs" of every kind can search, cross-reference, and use.
The source
Between 2008 and 2014, David H. Fears published Mark Twain Day by Day in four large volumes through his own imprint, Horizon Micro Publishing. Working from Clemens's letters, notebooks, and autobiographical dictations, together with contemporary newspapers, family papers, business and legal records, and the standard biographical scholarship, Fears reconstructed Twain's life one day at a time. Alan Gribben called it "the single most essential reference work in Mark Twain scholarship."
The chronicle documents 13,716 distinct calendar days — roughly half of the 27,171 days Clemens lived — across about 14,419 date-anchored entries totaling some 2.8 million words. Ninety-eight percent of entries are pinned to an exact single day.
From print to wiki
Because the volumes were sold directly and printed in small runs, they reached mostly university libraries, leaving individual readers with limited access. In 2019 the Center for Mark Twain Studies (CMTS) at Elmira College received Fears's permission to build a digital edition, opening the chronology to a worldwide audience. After the site was taken offline in 2024, this wiki carries that work forward as a rebuilt, openly editable platform.
What you'll find here
The wiki presents a verion Fears's chronology as browsable, date-keyed entries, enriched with structured indexes drawn from the text: the people Twain knew and encountered, the places he traveled and lived, the corporate bodies (firms, clubs, publishers, institutions) he dealt with, and the publications he wrote, read, and appeared in. These indexes let readers move laterally through Twain's world — following a person, a place, or a title across the whole span of his life — rather than only forward through time. it will be a place for our scholars to discuss and work on the DMTDBD project and move it forward.
Credits
Mark Twain Day by Day was created by David H. Fears. The digital edition is a project of the Center for Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College, whose director, Joe Lemak, acquired the digital rights from Fears. Project contributors include Stephen Rachman, Gillian McDonald, Dean Rehberger (Michigan State University), Alicia Sheil, and Catherine Foley, with support from Susan Jaffe Tane.
Contributing
This is a resource restricted to scholars working on the DMTDBD project.. Corrections, additions, and new cross-references are welcome — if you spot an error or can supply a missing detail, you can help make the record more complete.
