Mark Twain
Mark Twain,pseudonym of Samuel L. Clemens. The name, a phrase meaning “two fathoms deep,” was employed in making soundings on Mississippi riverboats. According to Clemens's questionable account in Life on the Mississippi, the name had been used previously by an older pilot, Isaiah Sellers (1803–64), to sign the pompous articles he contributed to the New Orleans Picayune. Clemens claims he burlesqued these in the New Orleans True Delta and that the parody so affected Sellers that he never published again. Therefore, Clemens declares, he adopted the name as a form of reparation. In that account he also paid tribute to Sellers as “the patriarch of the craft” of steamboat piloting. Clemens's first-known use of the name occurs in a contribution to the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise on February 3, 1863.
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