Two Fathoms or Safe Water: Mark Twain's Pen Name

Having spent time as a steamboat captain, Samuel Clemens was intimately familiar with the term that later became his pen name.  According to the Mark Twain biography by Ken Burns, mark twain marks the line between safe and dangerous waters for a steamboat.  The term twain means two fathoms or twelve feet deep; mark twain was called out when the water twelve feet deep under the boat. His time as a steamboat captain was a pivotal point in his life; the river carved a path through him and left an indelible mark on his character.  He chooses his pen name when he began writing his adventures out west.  The first time he penned a piece as Mark Twain he was in Nevada working with a group of newsmen that lived an adventurous “proto-psychedelic” life (Burns).  His life was on the edge of safe and dangerous; shortly after taking on his pen name he fled Nevada to escape a dual he was sure he was going to lose.

His choice of pen name shows a duality that existed in his life.  As Samuel Clemens he was from small river-town, as Mark Twain he was a renowned writer and orator.   He ran to the west with his brother after a short stint in the civil war; he spent his time in the west living on the edge of civilization and observing every part of life on the edge.  Twain was a “southerner and a northerner; a westerner and a New England Yankee; a tireless wanderer, who lived in a thousand places all around the world” (Burns).  Twain’s experiences afforded him a unique view of people and the world.  Burns describes Twain as a “noticer” saying that he observed people: the way the dressed, their mannerism, their speech, and their pretentions.  From his observations, Twain wrote, and his in his writing he “spok[e] for the American people” (Burns). If Twain was a speaker for the American people, then the pen name Mark Twain represented Clemens’s life and late 19^th Century America.  He was not using a pseudonym to hide his identity, but rather to reveal a part of his identity, and to comment on America as he saw it. 

Mark Twain represents a person and an idea about America.  Twain saw what America was and what American could be; he saw it as sitting on the edge of safe and dangerous waters and dedicated his writing to showing America as he saw it.