degree from Oxford.

Publishes “Extract from Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven” in Harper’s Magazine (Dec. 1907-Jan. 1908).

1908 Conceives the idea of forming a club called the “Aquarium,” whose members would be schoolgirls between ten and sixteen years old called “angelfish.”

Moves into new house in Redding, Connecticut, and at daughter Clara’s suggestion calls it “Stormfield.”

1909 Daughter Jean dies December 24.

1910 Travels to Bermuda; begins to have chest pains.

Returns to Stormfield; dies April 21.

TALES AND SKETCHES

Twain’s genius was constitutionally eruptive, and for that reason much of his best work is to be found in his short fiction where the spontaneity of his imagination, combined as it almost always was with meticulous revision, could be given free rein. The writer was naturally adept at most short forms—the tall tale, the sketch, the burlesque and parody, the fable—but he was also disposed to ring some changes on narrative conventions. “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” is a case in point. Clemens had heard a man named Ben Coon tell the story in a mining camp in the California foothills and made brief notes for a tale to be written at some future date. When Artemus Ward requested a humorous tale of him for a collection of such stories, Twain had his opportunity, and he chose the familiar form of the frame tale to structure the narrative. A frame tale typically begins with a genteel narrator (educated, correct, and a bit stodgy) who comes in contact with a vernacular character (unrefined and ungrammatical) who, in his turn, spins a humorous yarn. The genteel character returns at the end to round things off. Because this sort of humor was popular in Eastern periodicals, there was a temptation for the writer to condescend to the frontier ruffian and to make him a figure of fun in order to please an audience generally perceived to be above and apart from such types. Twain, on the other hand, more often than not makes the teller (in this case Simon Wheeler) and the principal character (here, Jim Smiley) amusing and certainly limited in understanding and opportunities, but they are sympathetic too. And within Wheeler’s frame of reference, Smiley and the mysterious stranger who bests him are men of “transcendent genius.” The Twain persona, on the other hand, is blind to the humor of the story and only belatedly recognizes that he has been, from the beginning, the butt of a joke concocted by Artemus Ward. “The Story of the Old Ram” is another frame tale, and once again, Twain, in the role of tenderfoot in the Nevada Territory, realizes that he has been set up by the “boys.” In believing that he has the privilege of hearing the notorious story of the old ram, told by a man who must be “symmetrically” drunk to tell it, Twain perceives, by the end, that he has been “sold.” Jim Blaine, on the other hand, is unaware that anything he has said is funny, and, instead of concluding a tale that really has never gotten started, he falls asleep midsentence.

“How I Edited an Agricultural Journal Once,” “Buck Fanshaw’s Funeral,” “Letters from Greeley,” and “An Encounter with an Interviewer” do not depend on the device of the frame tale as a form, but they do participate in the humor of encounters between and among characters of different backgrounds and experience. Two of them benefit from Twain’s journalistic experience—he wrote “How I Edited an Agricultural Journal Once” at a time when he was one-third owner of a Buffalo newspaper and was involved in making editorial decisions of his own; as a journalist and, later as something of a celebrity himself, Twain had been on both sides of the reporter’s notepad and knew something about the latent comedy in any encounter with an interviewer. His days in the West had thoroughly acquainted him with the slang and argot of the mining camps, and with men such as Buck Fanshaw, a “bully boy with a glass-eye” and who never “shook his mother.” “Letters from Greeley,” on the other hand, is founded on two widely known facts—that Greeley was an amateur farmer who published his views on agriculture and that his handwriting was notoriously illegible. All of these tales depend on some form of miscommunication for their humor, but beyond and above that common foundation, Twain’s humorous imagination might soar to unexplored territory. Everyone has had trouble deciphering another’s handwriting, but who else but Twain could read into the scrawl: “Bolivia extemporizes mackeral.” Everyone in a temper has improvised some sort of profanity, but who else but Twain could unleash these ripe expletives upon the regular editor of an agricultural journal: “you cornstalk, you cabbage, you son of a cauliflower . . . You turnip! . . . Yam! . . . Pie-plant!”

In dramatic contrast to Twain’s tall tales and humorous sketches, “A True Story, Repeated Word for Word as I Heard It” is a morally serious story. Nevertheless, Clemens enlisted the devices of humor and modified them to his purpose. The Aunt Rachel of this tale was, in fact, Mary Cord, the servant of Clemens’s sister-in-law, Susan Crane, at Quarry Farm, which overlooks the town of Elmira, New York. Clemens had more than once boasted that, because he had grown up around slaves in Missouri, he was better acquainted with the temperament of blacks than New Yorkers. Susan Crane was not convinced, and urged Clemens to ask Mary Cord to tell her own story.