Humor Twain, Mark: The Jumping Frog: A Compendium. v1. 12 Feb 2019

[GrannyGrump]

THE JUMPING FROG: A COMPENDIUM
BY MARK TWAIN (Samuel Langhorne Clemens)
(1835–1910)

The contents of this book were first published in 1865, 1872, 1875, 1894, 1903. The text of this book is in the public domain world-wide because the author died more than 100 years ago, and it was published prior to 1924.

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This is Mark Twain’s most famous short story: Jim Smiley’s Frog is familiar to readers all over the world. Its appearance in the Saturday Press newspaper in 1865 brought Twain his first nation-wide attention.

This compilation includes the original Jumping Frog tale, the French translation published in the Revue des Deux Mondes in 1872, and Twain’s hilarious word-for-word literal translation back to English. The later “Private History” discusses the revelation of a parallel story centuries earlier in ancient Greece, with a wry addendum.

A brief excerpt --- Jim Smiley didn't only keep frogs:

“Thish-yer Smiley had a mare — the boys called her the fifteen-minute nag, but that was only in fun, you know, because of course she was faster than that — and he used to win money on that horse, for all she was so slow and always had the asthma, or the distemper, or the consumption, or something of that kind. They used to give her two or three hundred yards’ start, and then pass her under way; but always at the fag end of the race she’d get excited and desperate-like, and come cavorting and straddling up, and scattering her legs around limber, sometimes in the air, and sometimes out to one side among the fences, and kicking up m-o-r-e dust and raising m-o-r-e racket with her coughing and sneezing and blowing her nose — and always fetch up at the stand just about a neck ahead, as near as you could cipher it down.”

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Mark Twain is most noted for his novels, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), the latter often called “the Great American Novel.” Among dozens of titles, some of his works include The Innocents Abroad, A Tramp Abroad, Roughing It, Life on the Mississippi, The Prince and the Pauper, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, and many more.

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Text was obtained from the Internet Archive. OCR and printer’s errors were silently corrected; punctuation, diacritics, and italics formatted; hyphenation normalized. Story titles are cross-linked to Table of Contents. Embedded font used for titling.

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This is a revised version of the book posted in 2012, revised to remove illustrations still under copyright.

Twain is always worth a second read-through!

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