Huckleberry Finn spends most of his story wearing assumed names: Sarah Williams, George Peters, Charles William Allbright, Gorge Jaxon, Adolphus, even Tom Sawyer. Yet most readers feel he remains, as he signs himself at the end, "truly Huck Finn." On the other hand, I don't know how Samuel Clemens/Mark Twain "truly" identified his self to himself. The display below indicates the impressive variety of ways he signed himself to others. Clicking on any of the signatures in the table below takes you to the letter or other document it appears on, embedded in a brief discussion (based on my limited study of MT's correspondence) of how SC/MT tended to use that particular name. Don't look for consistency. Between 1872 and 1910, for instance, he wrote hundreds of letters to W.D.Howells. He signed most "Yours ever, Mark." But he signed some "Yours ever, Clemens," and on others used "Saml. L. Clemens," "S.L.C," "S.L.Clemens," and "Twain" as signatures. (Howells, who almost always signed himself "W.D.Howells," addressed his friend as "My dear Clemens.")

The first four signatures are from letters to Olivia Langdon, before she became Mrs. Samuel Clemens; these are in the Mark Twain Papers at the University of California, Berkeley. The remaining examples are all from the Barrett Collection, University of Virginia Small Special Collections Library.