The Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain
CONTENTS
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
A Note on the Text
Introduction
The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County
The Story of the Bad Little Boy
Cannibalism in the Cars
A Day at Niagara
Legend of the Capitoline Venus
Journalism in Tennessee
A Curious Dream
The Facts in the Great Beef Contract
How I Edited an Agricultural Paper
A Medieval Romance
My Watch
Political Economy
Science vs. Luck
The Story of the Good Little Boy
Buck Fanshaw’s Funeral
The Story of the Old Ram
Tom Quartz
A Trial
The Trials of Simon Erickson
A True Story
Experience of the McWilliamses with Membranous Croup
Some Learned Fables for Good Old Boys and Girls
The Canvasser’s Tale
The Loves of Alonzo Fitz Clarence and Rosannah Ethelton
Edward Mills and George Benton: A Tale
The Man Who Put Up at Gadsby’s
Mrs. McWilliams and the Lightning
What Stumped the Bluejays
A Curious Experience
The Invalid’s Story
The McWilliamses and the Burglar Alarm
The Stolen White Elephant
A Burning Brand
A Dying Man’s Confession
The Professor’s Yarn
A Ghost Story
Luck
Playing Courier
The Californian’s Tale
The Diary of Adam and Eve
The Esquimau Maiden’s Romance
Is He Living or Is He Dead?
The £1,000,000 Bank-Note
Cecil Rhodes and the Shark
The Joke That Made Ed’s Fortune
A Story Without an End
The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg
The Death Disk
Two Little Tales
The Belated Russian Passport
A Double-Barreled Detective Story
The Five Boons of Life
Was It Heaven? Or Hell?
A Dog’s Tale
The $30,000 Bequest
A Horse’s Tale
Hunting the Deceitful Turkey
Extract from Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven
A Fable
The Mysterious Stranger
About the Author
Ask your bookseller for more Bantam Classics
Copyright Page
For Hanna and Colin Palmerston
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wish to express my gratitude to Harper & Brothers and to the Mark Twain Estate, without whose cooperation it would not have been possible to publish this volume. I owe particular thanks to Mr. Frank MacGregor of Harpers and to Mr. Henry Nash Smith of the University of California (Berkeley) for courtesies extended to me.
C.N.
A NOTE ON THE TEXT
The present volume contains a total of sixty stories, thirteen of them gathered from works of non-fiction. They cover the entire span of Twain’s published works, from 1865 to 1916, six years after his death. The text is that of the Stormfield Edition of Twain’s Works, published in 1929 by Harper & Brothers in thirty-seven volumes. The stories are arranged chronologically according to the years of first publication, and alphabetically within a given year whenever more than one story was published within that year.
“A Cure for the Blues” is an example of a short piece which I did not include. It is a sort of burlesque book review, with none of the usual attributes of a story. “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed” is another example. It is a piece of reminiscence which comes close to being autobiography and again is clearly something other than a short story.
C.N.
INTRODUCTION
NOT LONG ago I happened to be reading Mark Twain’s Roughing It, when I was piqued by his habit of inserting yarns of pure fiction in a non-fictional work, yarns tossed in just because they were good ones which he had in his head at the time. I counted five yarns or stories in Roughing It and wondered if there were others in some of his other non-fictional books. Sure enough, there were: two in A Tramp Abroad, three in Life on the Mississippi, and three in Following the Equator. “What a curious habit!” I thought. But Twain is full of curious habits, both personal and literary, and you either love him or you don’t, regardless. I do. It is just his unconventionality, as a literary figure as well as a man, which makes him so appealing to those who like him.
“Strictly speaking, however, these yarns don’t belong in the books which house them,” I thought. “They belong with his other tales, the stories which are plainly recognized as such. They ought to be included in his collected stories. Let’s see if they are.” And so I went across the street to the Columbia University library, where I discovered, to my surprise, that his stories had never been put together apart from essays, anecdotes, and the like.
Here is a man, a very great man, a national monument, you might say, who has been dead these forty-odd years without having had his stories collected, when lesser men, just recently dead, or still living, have had that mark of honor offered them by the publishing world and the public. Why? Is it because he is not a good writer of stories? But he is acknowledged to have written some great stories and I believe it is generally conceded that as a story writer he is among our best. Is it because his output was so large, varied, and popular that his stories have been overshadowed—by the novels and travel books? Or is it because he is not a formalist and did not himself publish his short stories purely as such?
During his lifetime his stories appeared in volumes which I can only call hodgepodge, containing as they did anecdotes, jokes, letters, essays—all sorts of serious and humorous non-fiction along with the fiction. Twain was a man who was very easy-going about border lines. Some of his short pieces fluctuate between fiction and fact. And he was a fellow who had very definite notions about the appeal of the grab bag. When he was a publisher himself he got William Dean Howells, his friend, to edit a collection of accounts of true adventure. Howells put the pieces together according to a scheme, and after Twain had looked at it he gently advised Howells to mix the things up, give them variety, so that the reader might be surprised. A formal scheme was about as appealing to him as a tight collar. This differed considerably from the French notions popular at the time and popular today.
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