Clemens the LLD (Doctor of Letters) in 1907. MT's first novel was The Gilded Age, 1873. Halley's Comet was again visible in the night sky. Mark Twain was 'born' here, in the office of the Nevada Territorial Enterprise, when Clemens first used that name on an article published 3 February 1863. 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. At the time that the telegraph brought the news of his death, I was on the Pacific coast. He never printed another paragraph while he lived, and he never again signed Mark Twain to anything. I did not know then, though I do now, that there is no suffering comparable with that which a private person feels when he is for the first time pilloried in print. It laughed at a man to whom such a thing was new and strange and dreadful. There was no malice in my rubbish but it laughed at the captain.

I showed my performance to some pilots, and they eagerly rushed it into print in the 'New Orleans True Delta.' It was a great pity for it did nobody any worthy service, and it sent a pang deep into a good man's heart. I burlesqued it broadly, very broadly, stringing my fantastics out to the extent of eight hundred or a thousand words. 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. In addition to Mark Twain, Clemens used the pseudonym 'Sieur Louis de Conte'. But it is often thought that the name actually came from his wilder days in the West, where he would buy two drinks and tell the bartender to 'mark twain' on his tab. William Faulkner wrote that Twain was 'the first truly American writer, and all of us since are his heirs.' Clemens maintained that the name 'Mark Twain' came from his years on the riverboat, where two fathoms (12 ft, approximately 3.7 m) or 'safe water' was measured on the sounding line, was marked by calling 'mark twain'. Samuel Langhorne Clemens (NovemApril 21, 1910), better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was a famous and popular American humorist, novelist, writer and lecturer.Īt his peak, he was probably the most popular American celebrity of his time.

Mark twain most famous books