SOURCE: "San Francisco: Literary Burlesques and 'The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County'," in Mark Twain, Twayne, 1988, pp. 15-18.

In the following excerpt from a book-length critical study of Twain's work, Gerber outlines the frog story's circumstances of composition and remarks that the narrators, rather than the anecdote itself are the central elements of the story.

Except for three months spent in the Tuolumne Hills, Mark Twain lived in San Francisco from May 1864 to March 1866. It was not one of the happiest periods of his life. Of necessity he took a job as local reporter with the Morning Call, the "washerwoman's paper." Most of what he wrote for the Call was routine reporting. But as daily contact with the sour underbelly of city life strengthened his impatience with cruelty and corruption, his treatment of such topics as street crime and police court procedures increasingly sharpened into satire.

As...