A Brief History of American Political Humor: References & Edit History

Although Samuel Clemens’s earliest use of the pseudonym Mark Twain has been confidently identified—he first used it in February 1863 in the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise—the exact origins of the name remain obscure.

In Life on the Mississippi (1883), Clemens provides an account of his pseudonym, which he claims he took from the senior riverboat captain Isaiah Sellers. Clemens describes Sellers as “a fine man, a high-minded man, and greatly respected both ashore and on the river,” but he highlights the needling pedantry Sellers showed in his observations of the Mississippi:

The old gentleman was not of literary turn or capacity, but he used to jot down brief paragraphs of plain practical information about the river, and sign them “MARK TWAIN,” and give them to the “New Orleans Picayune.” They related to the stage and condition of the river, and were accurate and valuable; and thus far, they contained no poison. But in speaking of the stage of the river to-day, at a given point, the captain was pretty apt to drop in a little remark about this being the first time he had seen the water so high or so low at that particular point for forty-nine years; and now and then he would mention Island so and so, and follow it, in parentheses, with some such observation as “disappeared in 1807, if I remember rightly.” In these antique interjections lay poison and bitterness for the other old pilots, and they used to chaff the “Mark Twain” paragraphs with unsparing mockery.

Clemens recounts that he parodied one of these accounts—“broadly, very broadly, stringing my fantastics out to the extent of eight hundred or a thousand words”—and published it in another New Orleans newspaper. The result was that “Captain Sellers did me the honor to profoundly detest me from that day forth.” So too, says Clemens, Sellers gave up his newspaper contributions:

He never printed another paragraph while he lived, and he never again signed Mark Twain to anything. At the time that the telegraph brought the news of his death, I was on the Pacific coast. I was a fresh new journalist, and needed a nom de guerre; so I confiscated the ancient mariner’s discarded one, and have done my best to make it remain what it was in his hands—a sign and symbol and warrant that whatever is found in its company may be gambled on as being the petrified truth; how I have succeeded, it would not be modest in me to say.

Clemens’s parody of Sellers has been identified in the New Orleans Daily Crescent (May 17, 1859), but this account in Life on the Mississippi, which he repeated elsewhere with varying degrees of consistency, is largely mistrusted. There is no evidence that Sellers ever published under the name Mark Twain. Also, Sellers died in 1864, a year after Clemens first used the pseudonym. (Clemens may have thought the death in 1862 of another captain, Isaiah Russell, was that of Sellers, possibly because of a mistranscribed name on a telegram he read while in the Nevada Territory.)

Mark twain is a riverman’s phrase for water found to be two fathoms (12 feet, or 3.7 metres) deep. Its connotations in actual use were variable: depending on a steamboat’s draft (the depth of water required for it to float) and on whether the steamboat was moving into or out of deeper water, two fathoms could represent either safe passage or hazardous shallows.

Another account of the name’s origins, considered far less likely, lies in Clemens’s habits in the Nevada Territory during the early 1860s. Some have suggested that he was given the name Mark Twain in the saloons, where he was said to order drinks two at a time and ask that they be served on credit. In this sense, the phrase mark twain is a truncation of the request “Mark me down for two.”