Originally published in the New York Saturday Press in 1865 under the title ‘Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog’, Mark Twain’s short story ‘The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County’ was one of his earliest pieces of writing and is probably his best-known short fiction. The story is widely studied […]
The most significant events in the history of books on the 30th of November 1554: Sir Philip Sidney is born. This Elizabethan poet wrote one of the earliest sonnet sequences in English (Astrophil and Stella), and in his prose romance the Arcadia, he invented the name Pamela. The name means ‘all sweetness’ (from pan meaning […]
Mark Twain’s 18 rules for writing – part of his response to the fiction of James Fenimore Cooper Mark Twain (1835-1910) is the writer who once observed, ‘The difference between the almost right word and the right word is the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.’ (We include that pithy gem in our selection […]
Fun Mark Twain facts, including his inventions, unusual lecture topics, and numerous pen names 1. Mark Twain wrote a pornographic story set during Elizabethan times. Titled ‘1601’, this bawdy tale – known as a ‘squib’ – was written in 1876 and purports to be the excerpt from a diary written […]
The best funny, witty, and wise Mark Twain quotes Mark Twain often gets the credit for all sorts of witty lines, but it turns out that he didn’t say many of them. So we set ourselves the task of tracking down the lines that Mark Twain actually did say – and this […]