Mark Twain in Cyberspace

Mark Twain would have loved the World Wide Web.

For one thing, it's the latest gadget -- and Twain was always a sucker for gadgets. It's no accident, for instance, that "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer," for all its evocation of life in a drowsy frontier village, was the first book ever written on the new-fangled "typewriting machine."

More to the point, if Twain were still with us, he would be the first to see in the Web a fresh opportunity to practice one of his favorite forms of recreation -- making himself conspicuous. And of course, as a self-described "citizen of the world," he would have felt right at home with the Web's instantaneous, planet-girdling capabilities.

Here's our annotated list of some outstanding Mark Twain-related sites and other resources on the Internet. Cruise them at your leisure, and please let us know if you find any new ones -- or e-mail us with your comments or suggestions.

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer seems to have been the first Mark Twain book to be made available in HTML electronic text, courtesy of Robert Stockton, a computer science research programmer at Carnegie Mellon University.

Ever the Twain Shall Meet offers e-texts of Huck Finn, Pudd'nhead Wilson and other works, as well as links to other valuable Twain sites.

The Mark Twain Library, a labor of love by Alan Eliasen, a research assistant (engineering) at the University of Colorado, offers e-texts of many short works and a few longer ones, including The Innocents Abroad and A Tramp Abroad.

Jim Zwick, a doctoral candidate at Syracuse University, takes a special interest in Twain's late, fervently anti-imperialist writings. His Web page Mark Twain on the Philippines brings together many of Twain's most colorful and stinging observations on the subject. Zwick has also developed the outstanding collection of Twain Internet links under the heading Mark Twain Resources on the World Wide Web.

Mark Twain in His Times is a lavishly illustrated "electronic archive," created by Stephen Railton and others at the University of Virginia. Using contemporary texts and illustrations, they explore how Twain's work's (including and especially the "Mark Twain" persona itself) were created and received during the humorist's own lifetime.

TwainWeb -- home page of the Mark Twain Forum, an excellent, MIT-based discussion group that has been conducted via electronic mail since 1992.

Real-World Mark Twain Places

At the moment, the easiest-to-get recent views of Twain's boyhood haunts (Hannibal and Florida, Mo.) are found at the Mark Twain's Hometown page, which is maintained (such is the Web) by students at the Roba-Goya English School in Tokyo.

The Hannibal, Missouri home page also offers a look at Twain's boyhood home, but so far, not a lot more.

The Web site for the Mark Twain House, Hartford, Conn., is currently (spring 1996) under construction, but has evocative images of the home where Twain spent his happiest and most productive years. (The house itself has been restored to its original gaudy splendor and is not to be missed by serious Twain aficionados.)

Mark Twain Sites in Elmira, New York features excellent views of the place that was the Clemens family's summer home in the 1870s and '80s (and the only place Twain got any real writing done for most of that time). This site also offers phone and snailmail connections to the Elmira College Center for Mark Twain Studies, as well as a number of valuable and curious links.

In "Frogtown," Calif., they claim to have preserved the Angel's Camp cabin where Twain first heard the Jumping Frog story in the winter of 1863-64. Have a look.

Not really about our favorite author, Twain's World is nevertheless an intriguing project of the Hartford Courant's Northeast magazine, self-described as "a celebration of Hartford's living history. Dead history need not apply."

The annual Calaveras County Fair and Jumping Frog Jubilee, which was held on May 16-19 this year, may not be literary, but it is indisputably inspired by Mark Twain. Or Dan'l Webster.

I said Twain would have loved the Web, but to be honest, Virtual Mark Twain wasn't exactly what I had in mind. This is a "high-performance computer animation," based on performances by Twain impersonator MacAvoy Layne, that debuted at the Virtual Reality Expo in New York City in 1993 and has since appeared at numerous trade shows and corporate conferences. Its creator, Gary Jesch, believes it recreates "the spirit and soul of one of America's favorite authors." Decide for yourself.

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