The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County

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The Front page of booklet for "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County"

"The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" is an 1865 short story by Mark Twain. It was also published as "The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" and "Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog." In it, the narrator retells a story he heard from a bartender, Simon Wheeler, at the Angels Hotel in Angels Camp, California, about the gambler Jim Smiley. Twain describes him: "If he even seen a straddle bug start to go anywheres, he would bet you how long it would take him to get to—to wherever he going to, and if you took him up, he would foller that straddle bug to Mexico but what he would find out where he was bound for and how long he was on the road."

Contents

[edit] Plot Summary

Jim Smiley was addicted to gambling. He bet on anything from the death of Parson Walker's wife to fights between his bulldog pup, Andrew Jackson, and other dogs. One day a stranger to the town agreed to bet on a frog jumping higher than Jim's frog, Daniel Webster. When Jim wasn't looking the stranger poured quail shot into Daniel Webster's mouth making it impossible for him to jump at all. The stranger won the $40 bet and escaped before Jim realized the con.

[edit] French Retranslation

Upon discovering a French translation of this story, Twain re-translated the story, word for word and keeping the French grammar structure, back into English. He then published all three versions under the title "The Jumping Frog: In English, Then in French, and Then Clawed Back Into A Civilized Language Once More by Patient, Unremunerated Toil." [1]

[edit] Adaptation

Lukas Foss composed The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, an opera in two scenes with libretto by Jean Karsavina, based on Twain's story. The opera premiered on May 18, 1950, at Indiana University. [2]

The story was also adapted as a scene in The Adventures of Mark Twain (1985 film), in which Mark Twain retells the story in short to Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn and Becky Thatcher.

[edit] References

  1. ^ The Jumping Frog
  2. ^ The Jumping Frog Of Calaveras County

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

v • d • e
Works by Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)
Novels:
Short stories:

"General Washington's Negro Body-Servant" • "My Late Senatorial Secretaryship" • "Advice to Little Girls" • "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" • "The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg" • "The War Prayer" • "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven" • "A Literary Nightmare" • "Luck" • "The Stolen White Elephant"
Short story collections:

Mark Twain's (Burlesque) Autobiography and First Romance • Sketches New and Old • A True Story and the Recent Carnival of Crime • Punch, Brothers, Punch! and other Sketches • Merry Tales • The £1,000,000 Bank Note and Other New Stories • The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Letters from the Earth
Plays:
Essays:
Non fiction:

The Innocents Abroad • Memoranda (monthly column) • Roughing It • Old Times on the Mississippi • A Tramp Abroad • Life on the Mississippi • Following the Equator • What Is Man? • Is Shakespeare Dead? • Queen Victoria's Jubilee • Mark Twain's Autobiography • Mark Twain's Notebook • King Leopold's Soliloquy • The Private History of a Campaign That Failed • Mark Twain's Weapons of Satire: Anti-Imperialist Writings on the Philippine-American War • The Bible According to Mark Twain: Writings on Heaven, Eden, and the Flood