A number of American writers spent great energy creating their self-images, Twain being one of them (also add Whitman, Hemingway, Kerouac).
Twain, Smiley, Frogs
On this day in 1865 Mark Twain published "Jim Smiley and his Jumping Frog" in the New York Saturday Press. The story was immediately popular nationally and then internationally, giving Twain first fame and the centerpiece for his first book, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches.
Twain's frog story established the yarn-spinner persona and the gullibility theme that he would profitably mine for his entire career. Given his own tendency to leap into things -- he was bankrupted by schemes to make a perpetual calendar, or a fire extinguisher that worked like a grenade, or a set of clamps to keep the blankets on, or the world's first typesetting machine -- it would be money that he would need.
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clipped from www.todayinliterature.com
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