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Directory of Mark Twain's maxims, quotations, and various opinions:

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

JUMPING FROG of Calaveras County

 


AI image created by Barbara Schmidt
When Artemus Ward passed through California on a lecturing tour, in 1865 or '66, I told him the "Jumping Frog" story, in San Francisco, and he asked me to write it out and send it to his publisher, Carleton, in New York, to be used in padding out a small book which Artemus had prepared for the press and which needed some more stuffing to make it big enough for the price which was to be charged for it. It reached Carleton in time, but he didn't think much of it, and was not willing to go to type-setting expense of adding it to the book. He did not put it in the waste-basket, but made Henry Clapp a present of it, and Clapp used it to help out the funeral of his dying literary journal, The Saturday Press. "The Jumping Frog" appeared in the last number of that paper, was the most joyous feature of the obsequies, and was at once copied in the newspapers of America and England. It certainly had a wide celebrity, and it still had it at the time that I am speaking of--but I was aware that it was only the frog that was celebrated. It wasn't I.
- Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 2 (2013)

[Speaking of Smiley, hero of the Jumping Frog story]
He was a real character, and his name was Greeley. The way he got the name of Smiley was this -- I wrote the story for the New York Saturday Gazette, a perishing weekly so-called literary newspaper -- a home of poverty; it was the last number -- the jumping frog killed it. They had not enough "G's", so they changed Greeley's name to "Smiley." That's a fact.
- "Mark Twain Put to the Question,", Adelaide South Australian Register, 14 October 1895

Flies, Dan'l
Illustration by Frederick Burr Opper for the 1899 edition of SKETCHES, NEW AND OLD


Jumping Frog statue at Angel's Camp
Photo of Mark Twain
courtesy of Dave Thomson.

 

The statue of Mark Twain with jumping frogs in Utica Park, Calavares County, California was donated to the City of Angels on May 25, 1944 by Warner Bros. after the filming of The Adventures of Mark Twain. The statue was made by P.C. Manuelli, a noted Italian sculptor. Read the story about the donation.



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