In either
case it was a good pocket that Mark Twain missed by one pail of water.
Still, without knowing it, he had carried away in his note-book a single
nugget of far greater value the story of "The Jumping Frog."
He did not write it, however, immediately upon his return to San
Francisco. He went back to his "Enterprise" letters and contributed some
sketches to the Californian. Perhaps he thought the frog story too mild
in humor for the slope. By and by he wrote it, and by request sent it to
Artemus Ward to be used in a book that Ward was about to issue. It
arrived too late, and the publisher handed it to the editor of the
"Saturday Press," Henry Clapp, saying:
"Here, Clapp, is something you can use in your paper."
The "Press" was struggling, and was glad to get a story so easily. "Jim
Smiley and his jumping Frog" appeared in the issue of November 18, 1865,
and was at once copied and quoted far and near. It carried the name of
Mark Twain across the mountains and the prairies of the Middle West; it
bore it up and down the Atlantic slope. Some one said, then or later,
that Mark Twain leaped into fame on the back of a jumping frog.
Curiously, this did not at first please the author.
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