24 June 1874 • Elmira, N.Y. (MS: ViU, UCCL 01103)
Dear Sir: “Mark Twain” was the nom de plume of one Capt Isaiah Sellers, who used to write river news over it for the New Orleans Picayune. He died in 1863, & as he could no longer need that signature I laid violent hands upon it without asking permission of the proprietor’s remains. That is the history of the nom de plume I bear.1explanatory note
Although the order of the initials in this monogram has not been established beyond all doubt, it is likely that Clemens used stationery he had borrowed in Hartford from Susan Lee Warner, wife of Charles Dudley Warner. Clemens may have intended this document as a draft for a form letter. On 9 June 1877, the San Francisco Alta California printed in its front page “Brevities” column a virtually identical letter, to John A. McPherson, dated 29 May, presumably 1877. In these letters Clemens gave essentially the same explanation of his pen name that he had been publicly committed to since at least late January 1873, when he included it in the autobiographical sketch he provided as “data” to Charles Dudley Warner ( L5 , 283). For a discussion of the discrepancies between Clemens’s account and documented fact, including Clemens’s incorrect death date for Isaiah Sellers (actually 6 March 1864), whose supposed prior use of “Mark Twain” remains unconfirmed, see Kruse, 2–25.
MS, Clifton Waller Barrett Library, Alderman Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville (ViU).
L6 , 166–167; Bibliophile Society, following 123, MS facsimile; Kruse, 3, 5, transcription and MS facsimile.
The MS, owned by John Needels Chester in 1919, was deposited at ViU by Clifton Waller Barrett on 17 December 1963.