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Grolier Club Exhibitions

“The Jumping Frog” and Mark Twain’s Leap to Fame

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Mark Twain was born Samuel Clemens on November 30, 1835, in Florida, Missouri. Clemens debuted his now-legendary pseudonym while working as a journalist in the Nevada Territory in 1863, and two years later he published the tall tale that would launch his career: “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.” The first book edition of 1867 quickly sold out, as did early reprints, and the name Mark Twain leapt with The Jumping Frog to national fame.  

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Vanity Fair, volume 3.
New York: Louis H. Stephens, 1861. 
 

The January 26, 1861, issue of Vanity Fair includes a sketch titled “The North Star,” which features a character named Mark Twain, possibly the original source of Clemens’s iconic pen name. This humor magazine, edited by Clemens’s friend Charles Farrar Browne (better known by his pen name, Artemus Ward), bears no relation to the current serial of the same title. 

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Artemus Ward [Charles Farrar Browne]. Artemus Ward; His Travels.
New York: Carleton, Publisher, 1865.  

Artemus Ward was a persona adopted by author and speaker Charles Farrar Browne. Ward, an illiterate but ironically wise character, traveled broadly, and his books are filled with humorous observations on the American West and Europe. Browne’s comic lectures further influenced Twain as a speaker. 

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Beadle’s Dime Book of Fun, No 3.
New York: Beadle and Company, 1866. 
 

This volume from publisher Erastus Beadles’s series of small, inexpensive books—called dime novels for their 10¢ price tags—includes an early printing of “Jim Smiley’s Frog,” an abbreviated version of the story that would become famous as “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.” 

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Jeremiah Gurney. Carte-de-visite photograph of Mark Twain.
New York, [ca. 1871].
 

A young Twain is captured here by preeminent New York photographer Jeremiah Gurney, who founded the first national organization of photographers: the American Daguerre Association.

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Mark Twain. Final page from an autograph letter signed (“Mark”) to publisher Elisha Bliss, Jr. Buffalo, N.Y, December 22, 1870. 

Charles Webb’s 1867 publication of The Jumping Frog was an instant popular success, but Webb’s publishing operation struggled financially, and Clemens accused him of cheating him out of royalties for the book. In this letter on Clemens’s personalized stationery, Twain recounts how he purchased the Jumping Frog back from Webb, and he offers the publisher Elisha Bliss, Jr., an opportunity to print a new “Jumping Frog pamphlet.”  

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The Californian, volumes 3–4.
San Francisco, May 27, 1865–May 19, 1866. 
 

Founded by Bret Harte and C. H. Webb (who published The Jumping Frog in 1867), The Californian contains some of Twain’s best humor writing. The October 1, 1864, issue contains his earliest article in the journal signed as Mark Twain: “A Notable Conundrum.” The December 16, 1865, issue, shown here, contains an early West Coast printing of “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County."

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Frederick Waddy, illustrator. Cartoon Portraits and Biographical Sketches of Men of the Day.
London: Tinsley Brothers, 1873.
 

Twain and his contemporaries embodied a new type of humor unique to the United States. In this collection of caricatures originally created by British cartoonist Frederick Waddy for the journal Once a Week, Waddy depicts Twain riding a frog as a horse, with the caption “American Humor.” The accompanying text praises him as “the best living exponent” of “the peculiar humor invented by our American cousins.” 

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[Mark Twain; William Dean Howells, and Charles Hopkins Clark, eds.] Mark Twain’s Library of Humor.
New York: Charles L. Webster & Company, 1888.
 

Twain quickly rose to prominence as one of the foremost American humorists. He nominally edited this compilation of American humor that bears his name, but author William Dean Howells and newspaper editor Charles Hopkins Clark did the lion’s share of the editorial work. The book contains short pieces by dozens of authors, including several of the “Phunny Phellows” and twenty by Twain himself. 

“The Jumping Frog” and Mark Twain’s Leap to Fame