Mark Twain, noted novelist and short story writer, was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens and raised in Hannibal, Missouri, which later served as the inspiration for St. Petersburg—the idyllic setting of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885). With these works, considered classics of American literature, Twain sought to illustrate his perspectives on American society and the small yet memorable experiences that create a history both rich and entertaining. From the passing of the steamboats along the Mississippi River to the minstrel shows, the lively townsfolk dedicated to their trades, and the folk stories he encountered in his youth, such aspects became the foundation for Twain’s fictional works and his exploration of Southern folk culture.
Mark Twain achieved literary fame with stories that gave voice to rich folk cultures in the Mississippi Valley and the American South. Twain’s characters, such as a Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, possess human qualities that portray the timeless complexities and challenges of everyday life. (Chaiba Media)
Published on November 18, 1865, in the New York Saturday Press, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” originally appearing as “Jim Smiley and his Jumping Frog,” is one such text by Twain that engages the folkloric convention known as the tall tale. Built upon humor and exaggeration, the tall tale expresses a memorable story of the culture and times; in this case, it is the story of Jim Smiley’s leaping frog and the circumstances of his lost bet. In the story, Jim is swindled by a stranger who bets him that any common frog could leap farther and faster than Jim’s prized pet. Jim’s pet is in fact defeated, but Jim is unaware that he has been cheated. The story offers an element of humor while also relating the folk stories unique to a specific culture, the mining camps of Calaveras County. This story was therefore instrumental in first solidifying Twain’s role as a humorist and gaining him significant attention, which later enabled him to write and publish his later works, including the tales of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.
In his engagement of myth and folklore within his novels and short fiction, Twain often emphasized superstition as the catalyst for larger transformative events. In The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, the protagonist Tom Sawyer enters a graveyard late one night with his friend Huck Finn, both drawn by childhood curiosity, an undying sense of adventure, and a superstitious cure for warts. In the novel, this midnight search serves as the inciting incident for the moral journey and epic adventure that Tom Sawyer undergoes, witnessing Injun Joe commit murder and later testifying in court to save an innocent man. Often within Twain’s works these superstitions take on larger significance in the lives of his teenage protagonists. Tom, a mischievous boy, finds renewed life, respect, and fortune as a result of these events. The novel is therefore the story of that journey, laden with adventure, a murder mystery, and a hidden treasure locked away in a distant cave.
Similarly, in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Twain also uses superstition to initiate the spiritual and moral transformation of its title character, Huck Finn. Here he uses several elements of superstition, as when Pap, Huck’s father, nails a cross into his shoe to ward off evil spirits, or when Jim, a runaway slave, is fearful of what he perceives as Huck’s ghost. These elements of superstition reveal the folk beliefs and larger cultural imagination of the rural folk Twain depicts within these works. At the same time, such superstitions reflect the multitude of folk tales that Twain encountered in his youth, tales indicative of real-world beliefs and cultures once passed down orally across peoples and across time. As in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, the superstitions in this work are integral to Huck’s growing understanding of himself but also to his journey, centered on the Mississippi River, away from his father, away from civilization, and to some unnamed, undetermined goal. Huck engages in a struggle against good and evil in this coming-of-age tale, and the superstitions revealed throughout forewarn him of the dangers present along his path.
Though not folklore themselves, both novels often incorporate additional elements of American folklore, particularly the expression of ancestral knowledge across generational lines. In Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, this appears in two forms: the cultural and learned knowledge that Jim passes to Huck along their journey downriver, as well as the wisdom Huck discovers along the way. For instance, in an early scene of the novel, Jim conveys an old tale he learned in his youth, claiming that a hairy breast is a sure sign of future wealth. While that tale may seem far-fetched—Jim, after all, is a runaway slave with a large reward offered for his capture—Jim’s tale does in fact prove true at the conclusion of the text when he obtains true wealth in the form of his freedom. This scene also anticipates the future wealth that Huck might obtain, though not disclosed within the novel, as he returns to the raft and the river, seeking a sense of independence and self he has yet to find. Such tales are at the heart of American folklore and are a core part of the representative portrait that Twain attempts to convey in the text.
Elements of folklore are also present in his 1881 novel The Prince and the Pauper, originally published in Canada. The novel, set in 1547 in England, recounts the tale of two young boys identical in appearance, one a pauper and the other a wealthy prince. Primarily a work of historical children’s literature, the novel follows Tom Canty and Edward VI as they switch places—an action that allows Tom to escape temporarily the abuse of his drunken father while Edward, heir to the throne, witnesses firsthand the class inequalities and corrupt judicial system that he vows to reform. The novel, a folktale grounded in history—what the Brothers Grimm term a “legend”—ultimately proved widely popular among readers of Twain’s day and age, and later was adapted frequently for the screen and stage in works such as a 1920 Broadway production and a 1962 Disney three-part adaptation. The Prince and the Pauper, like Twain’s other fiction works, offers commentary on the culture and people depicted while, at the same time, recording the history of those people in an entertaining and memorable form that could easily be passed down orally across generations.
Mark Twain later engages this folk tradition in his nonfiction works, such as his 1883 travel book entitled Life on the Mississippi. Focused on his days as a steamboat pilot and his nostalgia for trips along the Mississippi River, this memoir incorporates Twain’s personal experiences and his real-world encounters with Southern folk culture. Twain, for instance, expresses his love of Southern intonation, writing in chapter 44 that Southern speech is akin to music, filled with elisions though limited in “r”s. In chapter 9, Twain reveals the endless stories of the river, the water itself being a book written in a dead language that shares its secrets with him. The personal narratives reproduced within this text express the allure of the South and the awe Twain felt as he traveled, his experiences interwoven with brief references to early explorers like Hernando de Soto, who also traveled this river long before. Together, these elements of Life on the Mississippi preserve the cultural and personal history of life along the river, all shaped through the lens of folklore and folk expression.
Both Mark Twain’s contributions to American literature and the representation of folkloric culture in fiction are evident in these works. Read in secondary schools and universities worldwide, his works present universal themes from the ever-present conflict between good and evil to the search for identity in an unfamiliar and confusing world. These tales continue to resonate with readers, thus solidifying their place in the American literary canon. His incorporation of humor and tall tales revisits folklore as a storytelling tradition intended to preserve and communicate knowledge but also as a tradition based in communal entertainment. Through his works, Twain provides his readers insight into the humor, struggles, and nostalgia of American life through characters such as Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Their very lives provide readers a portrait of the cultures from which they were derived, while their experiences are just as much a composite of the folklore of Missouri and Twain’s imaginative tall tales. Twain’s skill is not just in his ability to make readers smile at the childish antics and superstitions of the characters he creates; his skill is in the carefully crafted portrait he shapes of a simple yet equally complex American life.
Christopher Allen Varlack
See also Connecticut Yankee; Folklore and Folktales; Huck Finn; Storytelling; Superstitions; Tall Tales; Yarns, Yarn-spinning
Further Reading
Brown, Carolyn S. 1987. The Tall Tale in American Folklore and Literature. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.
LeMaster, J. R., and James D. Wilson, eds. 1993. The Mark Twain Encyclopedia. New York: Garland.
West, Victor Royce. 1930. Folklore in the Works of Mark Twain. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Wonham, Henry B. 1993. Mark Twain and the Art of the Tall Tale. New York: Oxford University Press.
Twain, Mark—Primary Document
Mark Twain, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” (1865)
One of the most celebrated authors in American literature, Mark Twain entertained his readers by putting colorful local personalities in humorous situations, where they tried to make sense of their circumstances through folk wisdom. In this story, perhaps Twain’s first major literary and commercial achievement, Twain’s character Jim Smiley symbolizes the rural culture of the American interior in his homespun mannerisms and preoccupations. It was first published in The Saturday Press in 1865, and then included in a book of short stories in 1867, which cemented Twain’s national reputation as a new and important voice in American literature.
Smiley said all a frog wanted was education, and he could do most any thing and I believe him. Why, I’ve seen him set Dan’l Webster down here on this floor Dan’l Webster was the name of the frog and sing out, “Flies, Dan’l, flies!” and quicker’n you could wink, he’d spring straight up, and snake a fly off’n the counter there, and flop down on the floor again as solid as a gob of mud, and fall to scratching the side of his head with his hind foot as indifferent as if he hadn’t no idea he’d been doin’ any more’n any frog might do. You never see a frog so modest and straightforward as he was, for all he was so gifted. And when it come to fair and square jumping on a dead level, he could get over more ground at one straddle than any animal of his breed you ever see. Jumping on a dead level was his strong suit, you understand; and when it come to that, Smiley would ante up money on him as long as he had a red. Smiley was monstrous proud of his frog, and well he might be, for fellers that had traveled and been everywheres, all said he laid over any frog that ever they see.
Well, Smiley kept the beast in a little lattice box, and he used to fetch him down town sometimes and lay for a bet. One day a feller a stranger in the camp, he was come across him with his box, and says:
“What might it be that you’ve got in the box?”
And Smiley says, sorter indifferent like, “It might be a parrot, or it might be a canary, may be, but it an’t, it’s only just a frog.”
And the feller took it, and looked at it careful, and turned it round this way and that, and says, “H’m, so ’tis. Well, what’s he good for?”
“Well,” Smiley says, easy and careless, “He’s good enough for one thing, I should judge he can outjump any frog in Calaveras county.”
The feller took the box again, and took another long, particular look, and give it back to Smiley, and says, very deliberate, “Well, I don’t see no p’ints about that frog that’s any better’n any other frog.”
“May be you don’t,” Smiley says. “May be you understand frogs, and may be you don’t understand ’em; may be you’ve had experience, and may be you an’t only a amature, as it were. Anyways, I’ve got my opinion, and I’ll risk forty dollars that he can outjump any frog in Calaveras county.”
And the feller studied a minute, and then says, kinder sad like, “Well, I’m only a stranger here, and I an’t got no frog; but if I had a frog, I’d bet you.”
And then Smiley says, “That’s all right that’s all right if you’ll hold my box a minute, I’ll go and get you a frog.” And so the feller took the box, and put up his forty dollars along with Smiley’s, and set down to wait.
So he set there a good while thinking and thinking to hisself, and then he got the frog out and prized his mouth open and took a tea-spoon and filled him full of quail shot filled him pretty near up to his chin and set him on the floor. Smiley he went to the swamp and slopped around in the mud for a long time, and finally he ketched a frog, and fetched him in, and give him to this feller, and says:
“Now, if you’re ready, set him alongside of Dan’l, with his fore-paws just even with Dan’l, and I’ll give the word.” Then he says, “One two three jump!” and him and the feller touched up the frogs from behind, and the new frog hopped off, but Dan’l give a heave, and hysted up his shoulders so like a Frenchman, but it wan’s no use he couldn’t budge; he was planted as solid as an anvil, and he couldn’t no more stir than if he was anchored out. Smiley was a good deal surprised, and he was disgusted too, but he didn’t have no idea what the matter was, of course.
The feller took the money and started away; and when he was going out at the door, he sorter jerked his thumb over his shoulders this way at Dan’l, and says again, very deliberate, “Well, I don’t see no p’ints about that frog that’s any better’n any other frog.”
Smiley he stood scratching his head and looking down at Dan’l a long time, and at last he says, “I do wonder what in the nation that frog throw’d off for I wonder if there an’t something the matter with him he ’pears to look mighty baggy, somehow.” And he ketched Dan’l by the nap of the neck, and lifted him up and says, “Why, blame my cats, if he don’t weigh five pound!” and turned him upside down, and he belched out a double handful of shot. And then he see how it was, and he was the maddest man he set the frog down and took out after that feller, but he never ketchd him. And—
[Here Simon Wheeler heard his name called from the front yard, and got up to see what was wanted.] And turning to me as he moved away, he said: “Just set where you are, stranger, and rest easy I an’t going to be gone a second.”
But, by your leave, I did not think that a continuation of the history of the enterprising vagabond Jim Smiley would be likely to afford me much information concerning the Rev. Leonidas W. Smiley, and so I started away.
At the door I met the sociable Wheeler returning, and he button-holed me and recommenced:
“Well, thish-yer Smiley had a yeller one-eyed cow that didn’t have no tail, only jest a short stump like a bannanner, and”
“Oh! hang Smiley and his afflicted cow!” I muttered, good-naturedly, and bidding the old gentleman good-day, I departed.
Source: Twain, Mark. The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County. New York: C. H. Webb, 1867.