The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County: About Mark Twain

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Mark Twain was born Samuel Clemens, the youngest of six children, in Florida, Missouri, on November 30, 1835. When Clemens was four years old, his family moved to the Mississippi River port town of Hannibal, Missouri. The introduction of the steamboat had turned the sleepy Missouri town into a hub of trade and activity and made an impression on the young Samuel Clemens. Though Clemens recalled the years in Hannibal fondly, it was not always so. Clemens had direct experience with death and disease of all sorts, including witnessing the brutality of chattel slavery firsthand in the slave state of Missouri. After his father died in 1847, Clemons took on a series of odd jobs in publishing, becoming a printer’s apprentice, a typesetter, and sometimes writer in places all over the United States, including St. Louis, New York, Washington, D.C., and Cincinnati, Ohio. In 1857, Clemens became the apprentice to a riverboat captain on the Mississippi. However, the onset of the Civil War in 1861 brought his riverboating to an end and Clemens moved to Nevada, where he eventually procured a job as a political reporter and began writing under the name of Mark Twain.

From Nevada, Mark Twain moved to San Francisco, California, where he continued to write, primarily as a reporter. During his time in Nevada and California, Twain occasionally mined for silver and gold, and it was during this time that he first heard the story of a jumping frog. In 1865, he wrote the story as “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog,” which was published all over the United States and gave Mark Twain instant notoriety. In 1867, the San Francisco newspaper The Alta California paid Twain to travel aboard and write about a transatlantic cruise to Israel and back. The result was Twain’s humorous narrative The Innocents Abroad (1869), which became a national bestseller and turned Mark Twain into a famous American writer. In 1876, Twain published The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and in 1885, his enduring masterpiece The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. By exploring the moral hazards of chattel slavery through the eyes of an errant fourteen-year-old boy, Twain’s masterwork continues to inspire and stir controversy well into the 21st century. Though Twain would never achieve the kind of financial success and stability he craved, he is considered one of the greatest American humorists and writers to ever live.