Why did Samuel Clemens pick the pen name Mark Twain?
“The Mississippi River will always have its own way; no engineering skill can persuade it to do otherwise,” wrote Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835. The river inspired Twain’s childhood dream to become a steamboat pilot as well as the author’s eventual pen name. “Mark twain” was what the leadsman on a riverboat called when the water was two fathoms deep — that’s 12 feet, which is deep enough to be considered safe for most boats of the era. In addition to a phrase commonly heard on the Mississippi, “Mark Twain” was the original pen name of Captain Sellers, an old steamboat pilot who wrote rather all-knowingly about river conditions for the New Orleans Picayune in the mid-1800s. In one of his early newspaper articles, Samuel Clemens parodied the first Mark Tw
