Isaiah Sellers (c. 1802–1864) was the riverboat captain from whom Samuel L. Clemens (Mark Twain) claimed to have appropriated the pen name

Mark Twain Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910), known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer, humorist, entrepreneur, publisher, and lecturer. He was praised as the "greatest humorist the United States has p ...

. The story of how Clemens started to use the name is told in chapter 50 of '' Life on the Mississippi'' and is summarized in the main article on Mark Twain. He allegedly wrote articles for the ''New Orleans Daily Picayune''. Since there are a few problems with the chronology of Sellers' death and Clemens' first use of the name, the story is not accepted uncritically by Twain scholars. Captain Isaiah Sellers is buried at

Bellefontaine Cemetery Bellefontaine Cemetery is a nonprofit, non-denominational cemetery and arboretum in St. Louis, Missouri. Founded in 1849 as a rural cemetery, Bellefontaine is home to a number of architecturally significant monuments and mausoleums such as the ...

St. Louis, Missouri St. Louis () is the second-largest city in Missouri, United States. It sits near the confluence of the Mississippi River, Mississippi and the Missouri Rivers. In 2020, the city proper had a population of 301,578, while the Greater St. Louis, ...

References

* R. Kent Rasmussen (1995), ''Mark Twain A-Z'', Oxford University Press. American sailors 1864 deaths 1800s births {{US-writer-stub