prospecting for gold and silver in Nevada. Broke, he took a job
writing for the Territorial Enterprise in Virginia City, where
for the first time he began signing his pieces "Mark Twain"--the
river call for a depth of two fathoms.
Precisely how he chose that name is a mystery. Clemens said
he "confiscated" it from a newspaperman who wrote for the New
Orleans Picayune in the 1850s. However, scholars can find no
record of any writer's using that name before Clemens. In
Virginia City, Clemens used the river term in a unique way. He
would tell bartenders to "mark twain"--that is, to add two more
drinks to his bill. Scholars believe it's likely he invented
the New Orleans journalist story to disguise his pen name's link
to the barroom after he became "respectable" in the East.
After fleeing to California and losing his newspaper job
there, Twain wrote sketches for a humor magazine. He published
a tall tale in a New York magazine in late 1865. The
story--"The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County"--was
reprinted in newspapers all over the country, and marked the
true start of Twain's writing career.
In January 1867, he went to New York City to write a series
of travel letters for a California newspaper. He continued
writing dispatches for the newspaper after he joined a group of
wealthy tourists bound for Europe and the Holy Land.
The trip took five months and had two important consequences
for Twain. First, it provided him with material for a book, The
Innocents Abroad, which brought him fame when it was published
in 1869. Second, the trip led to his meeting Olivia ("Livy")
Langdon, who would become his wife. Livy's brother had gone on
the trip and introduced Twain to his sister afterwards. Twain
and Livy were married in February 1870 and went to live in
Buffalo, New York. Some scholars believe that Twain's
description of Tom and Becky's courtship in Tom Sawyer is a
parody (take-off) of his own bumpy courtship of Livy.
The couple moved to Hartford, Connecticut, in 1871. There
Twain wrote Roughing It, a book about his experiences in Nevada
and California. Published in 1872, the book added to his
reputation as a humorist.
In 1873, he collaborated with a neighbor, Charles Dudley
Warner, on his first novel. Called The Gilded Age, the novel
satirized the political corruption and the mania for speculation
that characterized the post Civil War era. The book earned
Twain a great deal of money. In 1874 he built his family an
extravagant home in Hartford.
