SOURCE: "The Californian: The Jumping Frog," in The Literary Apprenticeship of Mark Twain, with Selections from His Apprentice Writing, University of Illinois Press, 1950, pp. 120-29.

In the first important scholarly discussion of the jumping frog story, Branch examines Simon Wheeler's narrative method and asserts that there are three levels of reality in the story—the commonsense world, the realm of oddity, and the realm of the fantastic—as represented by the figures of the genteel narrator, Simon Wheeler, and Jim Smiley.

In the thirteen years between "The Dandy Frightening the Squatter" and "Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog"¹⁰ Mark Twain came full circle, for the major difference between these two tales is quality of workmanship. Each is a short narrative using a native theme. Each tells an anecdote in the tall tale tradition of the early Southwestern humorists.¹¹ Each is rooted in American folklore and came to written...