While in the Nevada Territory, Sam resumed writing humorous sketches and travel letters and began using the pseudonym, Mark Twain, a term for water that is only two fathoms — twelve feet — deep. Twain continued to sign his more serious pieces as “S. L. Clemens,” but the farces, hoaxes, and satires that were to make him famous were now authored by “Mark Twain.” With the realization that he had an audience for his brand of bawdy humor, Twain began to travel extensively and write humorous travel letters for the San Francisco Alta California. The Alta California sponsored his steamship journey from New York to the Mediterranean, and the resulting travel letters increased his audience and admirers; Twain’s literary rise was under way.
Between 1864 and 1870, Twain contributed articles and travel letters to various newspapers and published Innocents Abroad (1869). After a long courtship, he married Olivia Langdon, daughter of Jervis Langdon, in 1870. Olivia proved to be a tempering influence on the often-moody Twain, and her family’s abolitionist views on slavery influenced Twain and his writings. As with Olivia’s father, Jervis, Twain eventually became friends with Frederick Douglass and supported the antislavery movement.
Because of the acclaim of Innocents Abroad, Twain gave up his career as a journalist-reporter and began concentrating on short stories and books. Using the method of parlaying his short story success into collections, Twain’s fame as a writer was immediate, and Innocents Abroad became a bestseller. The satire Twain used to expose the so-called sophistication of the Old World, in contrast to the old-fashioned American common sense, is similar to that found some ten years later in A Tramp Abroad (1880), The Prince and the Pauper (1881), and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), when Hank Morgan confronts nobility and knighthood.
