The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County - summary
Mark Twain's "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" was first published in November 18, 1865. It is set in a gold-mining camp in Calaveras County, California, and has its origins in the folklore of the Gold Rush era.
"Jumping Frog" was originally told as a letter. In the story, Twain recounts his visit with an old man named Simon Wheeler in a California mining camp. Wheeler tells Twain a colorful story about another miner, Jim Smiley. According to Wheeler, Smiley loved to make bets; he would bet on nearly anything. Wheeler relates some of Smiley's more famous gambling escapades, one of which concerns a pet frog. Critics frequently cite this story as an example of a tall tale and note Twain's use of humor and exaggeration. They also emphasize the tale's satirical focus on storytelling and existing cultural differences between the western and eastern regions of the United States.
Mark Twain's "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" was first published in the November 18,1865, edition of The New York Saturday Press, under the title ' 'Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog." The story, which has also been published as "The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," is set in a gold-mining camp in Calaveras County, California, and has its origins in the folklore of the Gold Rush era. It was one of Twain's earliest writings, and helped establish his reputation as a humorist. He eventually included it as the title story in his first collection of tales.
"Jumping Frog" was originally told in epistolary form—that is, as a letter—though some reprints of the tale have since omitted this letter-frame convention. In the story, Twain recounts his visit, made at the request of a friend back East, to an old man named Simon Wheeler in a California mining camp.
Wheeler tells Twain a colorful story about another miner, Jim Smiley. According to Wheeler, Smiley loved to make bets; he would bet on nearly anything. Wheeler relates some of Smiley's more famous gambling thriftescapades, one of which concerns a pet frog. Cr
itics frequently cite this story as an example of a tall tale and note Twain's use of humor and exaggeration. They also emphasize the tale's satirical focus on storytelling and existing cultural differences between the western and eastern regions of the United States.
Mark Twain
Philip Fisher
In 1861 at the age of twenty-six Samuel Clemens deserted the Company of Missouri Volunteers; in effect, "resigning" from the Civil War in its opening days. He set out for the territory of Nevada to spend the years of the war prospecting for silver, loafing in bohemian ease, and learning the newspaper world of the booming West. He had, by means of his flight, decided that his was to be the generation that lived in the shadow of the gold rush rather than that of the Civil War. His would be the age of suddenly worthless silver-mine shares rather than the aftermath of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Samuel Clemens would be part of a generation rotating dizzily around the pole of wealth r
ather than that of race.
Presided over by P. T. Barnum, but also by the seemingly endless and lucrative inventive fertility of Thomas Edison, its fortunes tied to oil and railroads, steel and coal, Clemens's generation used up reality in double time. It raced from the steamboat age of a canal-, river-, and waterway-linked republic of the 1840s and 1850s, through the continental spree of railroad building after the Civil War, to the onset of democratic private transportation: Henry Ford's Model T passenger car of the 1900s. The railroad boom meant the collapse of the steamboats and canals just as, later, the highways, buses, automobiles, and trucking industry would bring down, in their turn, the railroads. It was Ralph Waldo Emerson's image come to life: each new circle was only formed to be, yet again, encircled.
Both wealth and fame had a magical and dangerous aspect in the years between the Civil War and 1910, the year of Clemens's death. That magic and that danger gave him the armature for his major works. The Clemens family lived in the dream, from which Sam at
an early age distanced himself, that the 20,000 acres of so far worthless Tennessee land to which they held claim might someday, overnight, make them rich. Magical, possible wealth from this land became a dream that sapped the life energy of Clemens's brother Orion and sister Pamela. Even Sam's various talents were in some ways always seen by him as his own, private Tennessee Land, assets that tottered between fabulous wealth and mere claims.
For the United States in these years wealth had an aspect of treasure for which the gold rush was an accurate preview. Oil, coal, gold, silver, or iron ore might be just out of sight, underground, like the money found by Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn in the cave at the end of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876). The largest fortunes were still made by selling and reselling the land itself in city lots or rural sections. The linking of the continent into the European economic system had converted scenery into real estate, dirt into land. Accidental rights-of-way where railroads had drawn a line on the map multiplied the value of every adjacent cornfield. Inventions like Clemens's own easy-stick photo album, the thought of a few minutes, earned him more than his books for a year or two. The Horatio
Alger qualities of luck, alertness, and daring paid off at a faster rate than hard work, thrift, and patience. The nation became one large exchange, a world of "prospectors," "claim-holders," and traders in imaginative schemes. It was a world of future values.

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