SAMUEL LANGHORNE CLEMENS (MARK TWAIN) (1835-) Samuel L. Clemens has made the name he assumed in his earliest "sketches" for newspapers so completely to usurp his own in public and private, that until recently the world knew him by no other; his world of admirers rarely use any other in referring to the great author, and even to his intimate friends the borrowed name seems the more real. The pseudonym so lightly picked up has nearly universal recognition, and it is safe to say that the name "Mark Twain" is known to more people of all conditions, the world over, than any other in this century, except that of some reigning sovereign or great war captain. The term is one used by the Mississippi River pilots to indicate the depth of water (two fathoms) when throwing the lead. It was first employed by a river correspondent in reporting the state of the river to a New Orleans newspaper. This reporter died just about the time Mr. Clemens began to write, and he "jumped" the name. Mr. Clemens was born in Hannibal, Missouri, a small town on the west bank of the Mississippi, in 1835. He got the rudiments of an education at a village school, learned boy-life and human nature in a frontier community, entered a printing office and became an expert compositor, traveled and worked as a journeyman printer, and at length reached the summit of a river boy's ambition in a Mississippi steamboat in learning the business of a pilot. It is to this experience that the world is indebted for some of the most amusing, the most real and valuable, and the most imaginative writing of this century, which gives the character and interest and individuality to this great Western river that history has given to the Nile. If he had no other title to fame, he could rest securely on his reputation as the prose poet of the Mississippi. Upon the breaking out of the war the river business was suspended. Mr. Clemens tried the occupation of war for a few weeks, on the Confederate side, in a volunteer squad which does not seem to have come into collision with anything but scant rations and imaginary alarms; and then he went to Nevada with his brother, who had been appointed secretary of that Territory. Here he became connected with the Territorial Enterprise, a Virginia City newspaper, as a reporter and sketch-writer, and immediately opened a battery of good-natured and exaggerated and complimentary description that was vastly amusing to those who were not its targets. Afterwards he drifted to the Coast, tried mining, and then joined that group of young writers who illustrated the early history of California. A short voyage in the Sandwich Islands gave him new material for his pen, and he made a successful debut in San Francisco as a humorous lecturer.