How and why Clemens came to adopt his doppelganger and from whom he may have “borrowed” his pseudonym are of much less relevance to his work than are his characterization of MT and management of his of point of view and narrative voice. Van Wyck Brooks, Leslie Fiedler, and Andrew Hoffman have speculated about his anxiety and repression as he sought acceptance in society’s upper crust; although they raise questions of psychological and biographical interest, like the ”Sam and Henry” query that initiated this thread, these questions can distract readers from a literary focus on narrative technique—especially point of view—in SLC’s fiction. In Huckleberry Finn, for example, it is possible to distinguish the point of view of Clemens from that of MT, as Andrew Hoffman asserts when he writes that Clemens “hides behind the scenes” and “challenges the moral foundation carefully set by Mark Twain” in a “disguised effort to secure recognition for himself.” While Hoffman’s interpretation is debatable, his sense of dramatic tension between Clemens and Mark Twain in the text is valid. This subtext is explored at length in Mark Twain and the Brazen Serpent (McFarland, spring 2017). The distinction between the respectable S. L. Clemens and the irreverent Mark Twain is a “twaining” that Clemens himself consciously and artistically exploited in many ways (see the “S. L. Clemens/Mark Twain trade mark” in the front matter of the OMT 1st ed. facsimile of Life on the Mississippi). Performing Mark Twain publicly enabled Clemens to play the role of the sacred clown, as James Caron has shown, while performing S. L. Clemens off stage gave him the upward mobility that he could not achieve as “a mere humorist.” The convention among 19th c. humorists of adopting an alias is the obvious explanation for Sam’s invention of MT, but when it comes to explicating his writings, it explains little. Perhaps that’s one reason why this is not The Artemus Ward Forum. It is often said that Mark Twain was ahead of his time, but in many ways, as Andrew Levy has shown, we are still living in his era. William Faulkner said that the past isn’t dead, it’s not even past. Let us not forget that SLC’s most famous fictional creation is the now-mythic character Mark Twain, who has survived his author by going-on 120 years, while his contemporary “phunny phellows" have been widely forgotten. Conflating these extraordinary twins by ignoring their divergences obscures important aspects of Clemens’s art. Subtle ironic effects often disappear when readers view them through the lenses of habit and convention, forces to which Clemens often opposed Mark Twain with subtle but devastating irony. Respectfully, Doug Aldridge Author of Mark Twain and the Brazen Serpent: How Biblical Burlesque and Religious Satire Unify Huckleberry Finn. (McFarland, 2017) MarkTwainandtheBrazenSerpent.com