The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County

Reading San Francisco: 1865

And so, after a half a year or so, we’ve finally arrived at the Big Bang of San Francisco literature — Mark Twain’s 1865 short story “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.”

Finally, after weeks and weeks of obscure guidebooks and memoirs, we’ve arrived at something you’ve heard of before. Because this story (along with Two Years Before the Mast) is the first really canonical piece of San Francisco writing in Reading San Francisco.

But I have a confession to make: I wanted to tell you how important the short story was. I wanted to say how influential it had been. I consulted a thick stack of scholarly articles about it. (Among them: “Mark Twain’s Use of California Folklore in His Jumping Frog Story,” “Mark Twain's Jumping Frog: Toward an American Heroic Idea,” “The Art and Satire of Twain’s Jumping Frog Story,” “The Jumping Frog as a Comedian’s First Virtue,” “’It Couldn’t Be Robbery To Steal That:’ Artistic Appropriation and Twain’s ‘Jumping Frog,’” “Caught on the Hop: Interpretive Dislocation in ‘The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County’” and “American Phonocentrism Revisited: The Hybrid Origins of Mark Twain's Celebrated Frog Tale”).

And I wrote two drafts of this post, and deleted both of them.

Mark Twain is an important writer. This is his first important work. And it’s the most important story written in San Francisco so far. But, as every high school English teacher will already know, there’s no quicker way to kill a piece of writing than to say how important it is.

Mark Twain might be a secular saint. He wrote one of the most important anti-slavery books in American literature. He was an impassioned critic of imperialism and organized religion. But I have to admit, as much as I admire that version of Twain, I don’t really like that much.

Here is the Twain I like: A too smart for his own good 30-year old shit poster working a job he disdains who writes a funny little troll for a friend based on a story he heard in a bar. He doesn’t care about it. In fact, he cares so little about it, he forgets to spell check it. (It was "full of damnable errors of grammar and deadly inconsistencies of spelling in the Frog sketch because I did not read the proofs,” Twain said.) When it gets popular, he complains to his mother that readers are ignoring his more serious stuff.

I love this guy. I have been this guy. I might still be.