Customer Reviews

The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches (1867) (Oxford Mark Twain)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

"Jumping Frog" is a wonderful, hilarious story (among a group of several other great ones) that my father read to me as a kid. If you love Twain, get it.

Yes - they can. At Heights Elementary in Pittsburg California back 35 years ago or so we would have a jumping frog contest every year in the circles used for kick ball. All the kids would bring giant frogs and let them go from the center of the ring. OH MY! It was so much fun - all because of this book (I am still scared of frogs to this day) but I love the book and every kid should read it.

How does one assign a rating to Mark Twain? One obvious possibility is to give them all his works five stars. It could easily be argued that they all deserve it. On the other hand, giving them all the same rating would make ratings useless as a comparison between his works. One could look at how Mark Twain would rate his own work, but in the case of "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches", published in May of 1867, it seems likely that Twain would have given it one star, given that he bought and destroyed all the plates for it. However, a one star rating would be a crime against literature and completely inappropriate for this collection. Ultimately, I can't see giving this book a rating below three stars, which might appear a bit low, but it does leave appropriate room for higher ratings for those of his works which are superior to this one.

The Oxford Mark Twain series is a wonderful collection. Each book is a facsimile of the first editions of his works (with a few noted exceptions), and the works are supplemented with a "Foreword" by the editor, an "Introduction" from a writer for whom the work had particular impact, and an "Afterword" from a scholar who examines the work in the context of the time and place in which it was written. The editor of the series is Shelley Fisher Fishkin, a professor of American Studies and English and an author of multiple books on Mark Twain. The "Introduction" in this volume is by Roy Blount Jr. and the "Afterword" by Richard Bucci.

In the "Introduction" by Roy Blount Jr., he states that he believes this is Twain's finest book. He indicates that the reason that this is true is because it is the only book which contains writings before Twain met the Honorable Anson Burlingame, and that without this book we wouldn't have any of Twain's later work. It is an interesting argument, but the last part doesn't really hold up because none of the sketches were published here for the first time, and Mark Twain had developed a name for himself before this book was published and probably would have continued writing if it had never been published. That being said, the core of the argument, i.e. that these works were important for the development of Twain as a writer, is certainly valid. The "Introduction" as a whole is humorous at times, but overly long and while Blount makes a joke of the padding he included, it was excessive to my tastes.

The original book is a collection of 27 sketches by Twain which were published in various newspapers around the country. In a couple of cases, the editor merged some of Twain's writings from multiple columns, and in many cases they do not appear under their original titles, but there are no pieces which appear here for the first time. Seven of these works were published during the American Civil War, and the rest were published in the year and a half after it ended with dates ranging from "Curing a Cold" (September 20th, 1863) through "Concerning Chambermaids" (December 15th, 1866). Many of these pieces are rich with Twain's humor and appreciation of the absurd, and some are a bit more thoughtful. The book is fairly short, and Roy Blount Jr. questions the omitting of certain of Twain's other works which he feels should have been included, in particular "The Great Prize Fight" and "Uncle Lige", as well as questioning some of the other editorial decisions. It is difficult to argue with this, as the reader certainly would appreciate more content.

The sketches vary in length, with many of the sketches only a few pages long, and others extending for more than 10 pages, but none of them are very long with the longest being the combination of columns which form "Answers to Correspondents" which is 24 pages. There is a lot to appreciate here, from the well known title piece, to the odd "An Item which the Editor Himself could not Understand", this is an enjoyable collection of short writings, and while it can't measure up to the greatness of "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" or some of Twains other works, it should not go unnoticed, and thankfully Twain failed in his desire to destroy all the copies in existence, for we would be much poorer without it.