Kevin Mac Donnell earned his MLS at the University of Texas and serves on the editorial boards of the Mark Twain Journal and Firsts Magazine . His essays on Mark Twain, Louisa May Alcott, Richard Henry Dana, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Russell Lowell, Herman Melville, Henry David Thoreau, librarianship, and antiquarian bookselling have appeared in numerous books and journals. He co-edited (with Alan Gribben) Mark Twain's Rubaiyat (Jenkins/Karpeles, 1983), contributed articles to the Mark Twain Encyclopedia (Garland, 1993), co-edited (with R. Kent Rasmussen) Mark Twain and Youth (Bloomsbury, 2016), and has reviewed over sixty books for the Mark Twain Forum. His discovery of the probable source of Mark Twain's nom de plume went viral on Salon.com and The Huffington Pos t, and was cited as "research of note" by The Chronicle of Higher Education in 2013. He was honored as a Mark Twain Legacy Scholar by the Mark Twain Journal in 2016. His collection of more than 11,000 Mark Twain items--first editions, letters, photographs, archives, manuscripts, and artifacts--is the largest in private hands, and is frequently shared with other scholars and museums.

A complete list of his published essays, book chapters, book reviews, conference papers, lectures, interviews, and Mark Twain House & Museum annual lectures can be found at academia.edu.