Mark Twain who was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, is one of the most famous American authors and humorists who lived from November 30th 1835 till April 21st 1910. He was born to a part time judge named John Clemens who purchased a large amount of land in Tennessee he hoped to get rich off but never did (Winship). By the age of 18 Samuel had moved to New York and had begun writing for some small local newspapers to get his foot in the door (marktwainhouse.org). While he would eventually marry and have three children, he decided at a young age to travel extensively throughout the United States (marktwainhouse.org). He experienced new and different culture which would help contribute to his writing and he eventually caught his first big break as an author with his story “Jim Smiley and his Jumping Frog” (marktwainhouse.org). This would help boost his popularity and prominence in the writing and lecturing community from then on out (marktwainhouse.org). His literary work has lead authors like Ernest Hemingway to say “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn (Winship).
His first book The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and other Sketches was published in May of 1867, and was his first piece of work that began to gain notoriety (Winship). Mark Twain discussed the origins of the jumping frog story in the April 1894 issue of the North American Review (Burkart). He began to state that the story itself was not his own and that it had been told to him by his friend Hopkinson Smith. Twain had given a Finish woman the story out of Harpers Monthly as an example of what ‘Negro dialect’ was like and she subsequently ran the story in Twain’s name instead of Smith’s, which led him to be accused of plagiarism by the Swedish press (Burkart). In the same article Twain went on to discuss how a Professor at Princeton named Van Dyke informed him that the story was actually a Greek one that happened two thousand years before Twain had ever written it, and how this perspective actually hurt him and was one he did not agree with (Burkart). Regardless of the origins of the story, it was an integral one in helping launch Mark Twain’s career.
“A Life Lived in a Rapidly Changing World: Samuel L. Clemens‚ 1835-1910.” Welcome to the Mark Twain House & Museum. N.p., n.d. Web. 07 Sept. 2013.
Burkart, Gina. “Past Perfect: The Jumping Frog Story – Both Old and New.” The North American Review Vol. 293, No. 6 (November-December 2008), p.40
Winship, Robert. “On the Autobiography Of Mark Twain.” Texas Review 33.1/2(2012): 101-1113. Academic Search Complete. 7 Sept. 2013
103A: American Literature from 1789 to 1900 
Mark Twain’s experiences while traveling certainly helped him in terms of developing characters, preparing the setting, and grasping at the local language that would be used in the telling of the tale. I think it is a bit of a farce for a Princeton professor to be “hurt” in the way that Twain told the story, regardless of its origins, because as a writer Twain should be able to take some liberties in telling a story to make it his own.
Mark Twain’s supposed plagiarism of “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” highlights the theme of storytelling within his narrative. The framed narrative with a protagonist that speaks with a heavy western dialect creates an almost Gothic tone towards the story. Not atmospheric Gothic, but in the aspect of Gothicism where the narrator travels to an unknown world. The narrator travels to a new place, the developing western frontier town, and learns about this almost mythological character, Jim Smiley; this plot reflects Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” where the protagonist learns about and believes in the local story of the headless horseman.
The contradiction between Twain’s hard work to manage to get a great start and how he achieved it through supposed plagiarism is quite ironic- as well as the subject matter of the story. It made me immediately think of the American Dream. In this story, the narrator travels to the western frontier town to find someone he believed to exist and yet only finds Simon Wheeler. This illustrated the negativity for some when they explored off to find their own American Dream.