Publisher Description
The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County is a wild yarn involving a case of mistaken identity, a gambler who’d bet on anything, and a very unusual frog named Daniel Webster. First published in The Saturday Press in 1865, the tale was immensely popular, and in 1867 an expanded version was published with 26 additional short stories, told as only Mark Twain could tell them.
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""The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and other Sketches " is essentially a collection of humor essays that Mark Twain wrote when he was working for a newspaper in California and includes the famous Jumping Frog story. This group of essays provide a great insight into the sarcastic and snarky humor that was a hallmark of many of Clemens writing style. Ironically, the Jumping Frog story probably isn't the funniest in the collection. My personal favorite actually turned out to be the "Concerning Chambermaids" essay. The humor contained in this book is surprisingly timeless (considering it's well over 100 years old) and left me laughing out loud many times. If you enjoy sarcastic humor that can be consumed in small bite-sized pieces, this is a great book to consider."
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Chris (5 out of 5 stars)
About Mark Twain
Mark Twain, pseudonym of Samuel L. Clemens (1835–1910), was born in Florida, Missouri, and grew up in Hannibal on the west bank of the Mississippi River. He attended school briefly and then at age thirteen became a full-time apprentice to a local printer. When his older brother Orion established the Hannibal Journal, Samuel became a compositor for that paper and then, for a time, an itinerant printer. With a commission to write comic travel letters, he traveled down the Mississippi. Smitten with the riverboat life, he signed on as an apprentice to a steamboat pilot. After 1859, he became a licensed pilot, but two years later the Civil War put an end to the steam-boat traffic.
In 1861, he and his brother traveled to the Nevada Territory where Samuel became a writer for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, and there, on February 3, 1863, he signed a humorous account with the pseudonym Mark Twain. The name was a river man’s term for water “two fathoms deep” and thus just barely safe for navigation.
In 1870 Twain married and moved with his wife to Hartford, Connecticut. He became a highly successful lecturer in the United States and England, and he continued to write.
About Robin Field
Robin Field is the AudioFile Earphones Award–winning narrator of numerous audiobooks, as well as an award-winning actor, singer, writer, and lyricist whose career has spanned six decades. He has starred on and off Broadway, headlined at Carnegie Hall, authored numerous musical reviews, and hosted or performed on a number of television and radio programs over the years.