By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
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 and analysed in schools and universities. But what does it mean?
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 all, and mela from the Latin for ‘sweet’ or ‘honey’, whence ‘mellifluous’). Sidney’s The Defence of Poesy (published posthumously in 1595) is widely regarded as the first sustained piece of literary criticism (or even literary theory) written in the English language.
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 of Mark Twain’s best one-liners, and we’ve offered our favourite Mark Twain facts here.) In his essay, ‘Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses‘ (1895), Twain took the author of The Deerslayer and The Last of the Mohicans to task for his flawed writing style. Scathingly, but hilariously, he writes:
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 by Queen Elizabeth I’s cup-bearer. Elizabeth has conversations with numerous notable persons of the age, including William Shakespeare and Sir Walter Raleigh. When somebody breaks wind, Elizabeth tries to find out who did it. (Spoiler alert: Raleigh did it.) As John Bird notes, ‘one of Twain’s points’ was ‘that the figures we now hold in such high regard habitually used extremely coarse language’.
It is surprising to reflect that neither of the books which are now considered canonical and quintessential Twain – Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn – was Twain’s bestselling book during his lifetime:
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 post is the result. We hope you enjoy reading these 15 of the very best Mark Twain quotes as much as we enjoyed compiling them.
The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter—’tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning. – Letter to George Bainton, 15 October 1888
I haven’t a particle of confidence in a man who has no redeeming petty vices whatsoever. – ‘Answers to Correspondents’, The Californian, 17 June 1865
I have been complimented many times and they always embarrass me; I always feel that they have not said enough. – Speech, 23 September 1907
Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society. – More Maxims of Mark, 1927