For a quarter of a century, one American man refused to let a single moment of his existence pass unrecorded. Between 1972 and 1997, Robert William Shields meticulously documented his actions every five minutes, day and night, producing a staggering 37.5-million-word diary.
He slept in shifts of no more than four hours just to ensure he could accurately write down his dreams. His daily log captured everything from his exact body temperature to the consumption of cold leftover fish sticks. Shields stopped writing only when a stroke physically disabled him, leaving behind a massive 91-box collection that dwarfs the most famous journals in human history.
A Compulsion to Chronicle Every Detail
Shields, a Protestant minister and high school English teacher from South Dakota, committed four hours of every day to his IBM Wheelwriter. Sitting on his back porch in his underwear, he typed spontaneous and uninhibited entries about the most mundane aspects of his daily routine.
The entries included precise times for changing a burnt-out light bulb, scraping dead skin from his feet, eating Stouffer’s macaroni and cheese, and checking county tax payments. He even logged his blood pressure, his medications, and the exact volume of his urination and bowel movements. To supplement his written words, Shields included physical artifacts with the pages, such as samples of his own nose hair.
Beyond the Record-Breaking Journal
The sheer volume of this work makes it 30 times longer than the famous diary of Samuel Pepys and millions of words longer than those kept by journalist Edward Robb Ellis and poet Arthur Crew Inman. Before starting this massive project, Shields attempted a journal at age 17 to document a romantic relationship but quickly abandoned it.
He also claimed authorship of the story base for the Elvis Presley film Love Me Tender, stating it was based on his edits of John Reno’s 1879 autobiography. In a 2000 interview, he mentioned writing 1,200 poems, noting that at least five of them were good. Following his 1997 stroke, his wife, Grace Augusta Hotson, briefly attempted to transcribe his dictations but soon stopped because she lacked his intense drive.
Unsealing the Washington State University Vault
The 91 cartons of diaries brought Shields national fame, leading to television appearances on The Oprah Winfrey Show and Primetime Live. He donated the entire collection to Washington State University in 1999. Shields died of a heart attack in 2007 at the age of 89 at his home in Dayton, Washington.
Initial reports stated the donation terms restricted reading the diary or verifying the exact word count until 50 years after his death in 2057. However, Shields also stipulated the archive could open after both he and his wife passed away. Following Grace’s death on April 17, 2024, the university officially began cataloging the massive collection that same year.