"The Celebrated Jumping Frogs of Calaveras County" - Mark Twain

"The Celebrated Jumping Frogs of of Calaveras County" is a great short story of a man who teaches a frog to jump well and makes a bet he is better at jumping than any other frog in all of Calaveras County. He ends up losing because the person he bets against sneaks bee bees into the frogs mouth. It is unfortunate for the man, Smiley, to make the bet. But It was bloody brilliant of "the feller" to do to Smiley. "The Celebrated Jumping Frogs of Calaveras County" is a great example of realism. Abby Werlock defines realism as, "he attempt to depict life as it actually exists, not as the author wants it to be in the present or the future, or imagines it was in the past. A realist carefully chooses details that illustrate this vision" (Werlock). Mark Twain does an excellent job of creating this small town image of Smiley's. There is this man who does what he can to get money and gamble. This is like many people today and like many people I am sure in this era. He is trying to depict the life of John Smiley as a life of some one in his time. This is what realism is. It is like a photograph of the time.

This story would also fit into the literary subset of realism, regionalism. Regionalism has the six characteristics of, "1) characters are stereotypical or picturesque, staunch traditionalists, who speak the regional dialect and whose actions and personalities are indicative of the region (in local- color literature by women, the characters are frequently spinsters, widows, or young girls, sometimes in financial straits); 2) the setting—typically rural, often inaccessible, and isolated from encroaching urbanization—plays an essential role in the story and may even be a character itself (stories usually orbit around the village or a similarly circumscribed locale and focus on the traditional practices of the community); 3) plotlines are sparse, especially in local-color stories by women writers; 4) often there is a framing device in which a narrator recounts a yarn or story about another region; 5) the narrator sometimes acts as the audience for the story; and/or 6) there is a narrator who is an educated, nonnative observer whose comments are meant to enlighten the urban audience" (Kasraie). These are all things Mark Twain does within his story, "The Celebrated Jumping Frogs of Calaveras County." The American Dream of this story would be a man living freely. I presume John Smiley was the "image" man of people of the West who live their life freely. He goes around doing what he wants when he wants. This is what the American Dream of this time period was. It was all about the Romantic Western United States. In all reality, it was not romantic and Mark Twain describes it perfectly in this story. Some of the people, like the feller, are not good people and, in Lehman's terms, can screw you over. Mark Twain realized this and this is what he depicted within this story.



Kasraie, Mary Rose. "local color." In Barney, Brett, and Lisa Paddock, eds. Encyclopedia of American Literature: The Age of Romanticism and Realism, 1816–1895, vol. 2, Revised Edition. New York: Facts On File, Inc., 2008. Bloom's Literary Reference Online. Facts On File, Inc. Feb 13, 2011.



Twain, Mark. "The Celebrated Jumping Frogs of Calaveras County." Glencoe Literature. Comp. Jeffrey Wilhelm. American Literature ed. Columbus; McGraw-Hill, 2010. 498-502. Print.



Werlock, Abby H. P. "realism." The Facts On File Companion to the American Short Story, Second Edition. New York: Facts On File, Inc., 2009. Bloom's Literary Reference Online. Facts On File, Inc. Feb 13, 2011.