The Complete Novels of Mark Twain and the Complete Biography of Mark Twain Read Online Free PDF

and might have pounded quartz for the rest of his life. Had his nerve held out a moment longer, he would never have gone to Angel's Camp, would never have heard The Story of the Jumping Frog, and would have escaped that sudden fame which this little story soon brought him.
    On his return to San Francisco, he dropped in one morning to see Bret Harte, and told him this story. As Harte records:
    "He spoke in a slow, rather satirical drawl, which was in itself irresistible. He went on to tell one of those extravagant stories, and half-unconsciously dropped into the lazy tone and manner of the original narrator. I asked him to tell it again to a friend who came in, and they asked him to write it for 'The Californian'. He did so, and when published it was an emphatic success. It was the first work of his that had attracted general attention, and it crossed the Sierras for an Eastern reading. The story was 'The Jumping Frog of Calaveras.' It is now known and laughed over, I suppose, wherever the English language is spoken; but it will never be as funny to anyone in print as it was to me, told for the first time, by the unknown Twain himself, on that morning in the San Francisco Mint."
    When Artemus Ward passed through California on a literary tour in 1864, Mark Twain regaled him—as he regaled all worthy acquaintances—with his favourite story, 'The Jumping Frog'. Ward was delighted with it.
    "Write it out," he said, "give it all the necessary touches, and let me use it in a volume of sketches I am preparing for the press. Just send it to Carleton, my publisher, in New York."
    It arrived too late for Ward's book, and Carleton presented it to Henry Clapp, who published it in his paper, The Saturday Press of November 18, 1864. In his Autobiography, Mr. Clemens has narrated how 'The Jumping Frog' put a quietus on 'The Saturday Press', and was immediately copied in numerous newspapers in England and America. He was always proud of the celebrity that story achieved; but he never sought to claim the credit for himself. He freely admits that it was not Mark Twain, but the frog, that became celebrated. The author, alas, remained in obscurity!
    Carleton afterwards confessed that he had lost the chance of a life—time by giving The Jumping Frog away; but Mark Twain's old friend, Charles Henry Webb, came to the rescue and published it. About four thousand copies were sold in three years; but the real fame of the story was in its newspaper and magazine notoriety. In 1872 it was translated into the 'Revue des Deux Mondes'; and it was almost as widely read in England, India, and Australia as it was in America.
    Meantime Mark Twain was still awaiting the rewards of journalism, and doing literary hack work of one sort or another. In 1866 the proprietors of the 'Sacramento Union' employed him to write a series of letters from the Sandwich Islands. The purpose of these letters was to give an account of the sugar industry. Mark told the story of sugar, but, as was his wont, threw in a lot of extraneous matter that had nothing to do with sugar. It was the extraneous matter, and not the sugar, that won him a wide audience on the Pacific Coast. During these months of "luxurious vagrancy" he described in the most vivid way many of the most notable features of the Sandwich Islands. Nowadays such letters would at once have been embodied in a volume. In his 'My Debut as a Literary Person', Mark Twain has described in admirably graphic style his great "scoop" of the news of the Hornet disaster; how Anson Burlingame had him, ill though he was, carried on a cot to the hospital, so that he could interview the half-dead sailors. His bill—twenty dollars a week for general correspondence, and one hundred dollars a column for the Hornet story—was paid with all good will. On the strength of this story, he hoped to become a "Literary Person," and sent his account of the Hornet disaster to Harper's Magazine, where it appeared in December, 1866. But alas! he could