The Trouble Begins at 8: A Life of Mark Twain in the Wild, Wild West

Mark Twain was born fully grown, with a cheap cigar clamped between his teeth. The event took place, as far as is known, in a San Francisco hotel room sometime in the fall of 1865. The only person attending was a young newspaperman and frontier jester named Samuel Langhorne Clemens.
Who?
A person of little consequence. He was a former tramp printer, Mississippi riverboat pilot, and ink-stained scribbler who’d made a small noise in the brand-new Nevada Territory.
Sam, or even Sammy, as boyhood friends and relatives sometimes called him, sat in the light from the hotel window scratching out a comic story about a jumping frog contest. He’d discovered the bleached ribs of the story not far off, in the California Gold Rush foothills. He now set the tale in his native folk language. He gave the story fresh and whimsical orchestration. He made it art.
He rummaged around among several pen names with which he’d amused himself in the past. Newspaper humorists, such as his friends Petroleum V. Nashby and Dan De Quille, commonly hid in the shade of absurd false fronts. Should he be Josh again? Thomas J. Snodgrass? Mark Twain? How about W. Epaminondas Blab?
Mark Twain. It recalled a shouted refrain from his riverboat days, signifying a safe water depth of two fathoms, or twelve feet. He’d given the pen name a trial run on a political scribble or two, but the name had only enhanced his obscurity. He had let it molder and die.
Still, he would feel cozy under the skin of a character from his beloved Mississippi River. Maybe he’d blow on its ashes and resur rect the pseudonym. With earnest decision, a possible snort, and a flourish of his pen, he signed the piece, “By Mark Twain.”