The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County By Mark Twain

Mark Twain Real name: Samuel Langhorne Clemens He was an American storyteller, entrepreneur, publisher, and lecturer. He used the pen name Mark Twain and several other names for his writings. He was famous for many of his works including The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, among others.

Mark Twain In 1861, Samuel Clemens avoided the brewing Civil War by going west. He took his first writing job as reporter at the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. Twain combined his writing with public lecturing and foreign traveling, acquiring an international reputation as humoristic-frontier-philosopher. By 1900 Twain had become America’s foremost celebrity. He was invited to attend ship launchings, anniversary gatherings, political conventions, and countless dinners. In his early life, he worked as a typesetter, miner, and a riverboat pilot.

The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County Twain combined humor, strong narrative and social criticism in his writings. Twain's first important work, "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County", was first published in the New York Saturday Press on November 18, 1865 He based his story on a story he heard at Angels Hotel in Angels Camp, California, where he had spent some time as a miner.

Satire- Gambling Satire is the literary way of ridiculing (making fun of) a weaknesses or vices in order to expose or correct them. The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County is a satire that makes fun of the character Simon, who has a problem with gambling. One way of sharing this is how he tells this in the passage, “heck, if he sees two bird perched on a fence, he’ll bet which bird will fly away first.” This shows that Jim’s addiction is so bad that he’ll bid on whatever he can.

Satire- Dialect The other example of how Twain uses satire in this passage through the regional dialect of the West. One way to show this is by Twain purposely using inventive punctuation, misspellings, loose sentence structure, etc. This was how Twain shows Western dialect. It almost makes the West look uneducated.

Theme- Lies and Deceit One of the main themes in “Jumping Frog” is deceitfulness and lies as well as the fine line that exists between cunningness and deceitfulness. In the story, Jim Smiley often uses ordinary or unnoticeable animals to win his bets, underdogs that come back and win at the last minute. His use of these ordinary animals gets other people to bet against his animals and ultimately lose their money when his animals win. Mark Twain's story shows that the people in the story are deceitful and lie in order to get what they want.

Theme- Cleverness The distinction between honest cleverness and dishonest cleverness is another theme. Jim Smiley is clever in how he fools others with the animals he uses while betting. Although he is being clever, despite not being particularly well-educated or well- spoken, he is not lying to or cheating his opponents like the stranger does. What this comes down to is morality. Cleverness alone is not dishonest, but the way the stranger wins the frog bet is clever in a dishonest way.

Realism Mark Twain’s writings were different from many of the writings of his time. Most writers in his time wrote Romantic or unrealistic stories about people who seem to be perfect and grand. Twain’s characters were real to life examples of the types of people one might meet everyday. His characters spoke in real dialects, and were ordinary people with ordinary jobs and ideas. He also included characters that came from different backgrounds and levels of education, which was different from Romantic writers whose characters were all from similar backgrounds and levels of education and never mixed with other classes.

Questions What is the tone of the story? What in the text supports this idea? What does monotonous mean? Does the narrator describing the story as a “monotonous narrative” when he heard it have any affect on how you perceived it? How does Simon Wheeler use exaggeration to establish the kind of man Jim Smiley is? Is exaggeration still a common vehicle for humor today? Can you think of any examples? What causes Andrew Jackson to die? How does Smiley’s cunning in choosing animals that don’t look like they could compete compare to the cunning of the stranger in filling the frog with quail shot? Is there an ethical distinction between the two?

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