Hi folks:
Here's a good piece on Kevin MacDonnell's research.
All the puzzle pieces seem to fit, as those of you who
attended the Elmira conference already know.
Roger Durrett
Charlotte, NC
* Apologies if this has been previously posted. If it was,
I missed it.
How Samuel Clemens Actually Became Mark Twain: He Stole a Bad Joke
AP
_Zach Schonfeld_ (http://www.theatlanticwire.com/authors/zach-schonfeld/)
270 Views 5:06 PM ET
It only took us a century and a half, but we may have finally learned the
real source of Samuel Clemens' ubiquitously recognizable nom de plume: he
stole it from a humor journal so lame that he quickly invented a cooler
story to pass off as true. But he wouldn't have gotten away with such a trick
today.
The theory is according to a find by a Texas book dealer and scholar, who
managed to stumble upon what seems to be the first recorded appearance of
the name "Mark Twain"—in a humor journal called Vanity Fair (no, _not the
contemporary magazine_
(http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/a-new-theory-on-mark-twain) ) two years before Samuel Clemens adopted it. Thankfully, Austin's
Kevin Mac Donnell was sharp enough to recognize the significance of his
find, though he was really only poking around Google Books and modestly _told
the Los Angeles Review of Books_
(http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/a-new-theory-on-mark-twain) that anyone could have done the same:
“I wasn’t looking for what I found. I stumbled across it,” Mac Donnell
said in a phone interview. With a flair for folksy humor that made Twain
famous, he also added that “you could train a cat to do what I did. You could
train a garden slug to do what I did, but the cat would be quicker.”
Scholars have never been clear on the source of Twain's pseudonym, but
stories emerged during his lifetime. One famously _suggested "Mark twain!" was
the writer's trademark cry_
(http://www.territorial-enterprise.com/mt_name.htm) in a Virginia City saloon he frequented, meaning "Mark two more
drinks." Twain himself claimed an altogether different source for his pseudonym:
he said the name had been used by Isaiah Sellers, a riverboat captain who
died in 1863, and "as he could no longer need that signature, I laid violent
hands upon it without asking permission of the proprietor's remains."
But that's been in question for quite a while, particularly after
researchers _scanned Sellers' river reports_
(http://books.google.com/books?id=Yj2RPXR4JjwC&pg=PA107&lpg=PA107&dq="as+he+could+no+longer+need+that+signature"&so
urce=bl&ots=5NzSySvWsS&sig=zUjNlI2Z9C3hR7Y9x4OoHAadig8&hl=en&sa=X&ei=DB5PUsu
HL_a-4AOHzoHIBQ&ved=0CDoQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q="as%20he%20could%20no%20longer%2
0need%20that%20signature"&f=false) and found no appearance of the Twain
name. Plus, Twain himself cheekily _cast doubt on his own version of events_
(http://www.petrifiedtruth.com/archives/001113.html) late in his life. Mac
Donnell's find, by contrast, adds up pretty well: Twain was known to read
the short-lived humor journal, which lasted only from 1859 to 1863, and he
even used some jokes by the journal's chief writer, Artemus Ward. Why
obscure the source, then? Besides the obvious fact that the riverboat tale made
for a better story, Mac Donnell's theory is simple—the journal wasn't
funny, and Twain knew it:
And then there was the stigma of being associated with Vanity Fair: the
fact that its contributors, the so-called “Phunny Phellows,” were, well, not
funny. “By the time Twain became famous, they were going out of style
pretty quick,” Mac Donnell said. A specialist in 19th century literature, he
added that: “In 1873, when Clemens was challenged on the source of his pen
name, he had already patented the Mark Twain scrapbook. He had already
branded himself Mark Twain. He had signed book deals and established his name. He
wasn’t about to go backwards into the Phunny Phellow mold.”
The LARB heralds the story as an indispensable example of Twain's savvy
self-branding, of how shrewdly he talked up his folksy Missouri roots and
concocted long-lasting stories to go along with it. Rightly so. But it's also
a fine indicator of just how much writers of Twain's stature could get away
with in the 19th and early 20th century, borrowing ideas or names
wholesale, before the Internet _sprouted its own cottage industry of fact-checking_
(http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/08/everyones-a-fact-c
hecker/260660/) , myth-busting, and sourcing. Had he adopted his pen name
today, Twain's decidedly uncool namesake almost certainly wouldn't evade
detection—we'd know plenty about his early life, and we'd _probably have his
yearbook photo on file_
(http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/03/philip-roth-goes-to-the-prom-photos-of-famous-authors-as-teenagers/274
377/) , too.
But, Twain _famously wrote in a letter to Helen Keller_
(http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/05/bulk-of-all-human-utterances-is.html) , "all ideas are
second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside
sources," and "ninety-nine parts of all things that proceed from the intellect
are plagiarisms." And the writer knew better than anyone: some sources are
cooler than others.
All photos: Associated Press
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_Zach Schonfeld_ (http://twitter.com/zzzzaaaacccchhh)
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