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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. Clemens was reluctant, but one evening he did ask the woman about herself, and the result was the inspiration for one of his finest short works. By the end of her story, Clemens must have known that he had been set up by Susan Crane and that the effect of Mary Cord’s tale was transforming. Once again, Sam Clemens had been “sold,” but in an entirely serious way. “A True Story” is not merely a transcript of what he heard, however. He shaped the narrative, giving it a coherent beginning, middle, and end; and through the artful management of gesture, what Twain sometimes called “stage directions,” he made Aunt Rachel a dignified and powerful moral presence. Twain submitted the story to the Atlantic magazine and—somewhat to his surprise—the editor, William Dean Howells, was pleased to publish it. It was the first time Twain had had anything accepted by that prestigious magazine. And it was probably the first time, as well, that he recognized that he could tell a genuinely “literary” tale with a serious moral purpose entirely in dialect. This recognition would later prove important when he began to write Huckleberry Finn.

“The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” (1865)
    In compliance with the request of a friend of mine, who wrote me from the East, I called on good-natured, garrulous old Simon Wheeler, and inquired after my friend’s friend, Leonidas W. Smiley, as requested to do, and I hereunto append the result. I have a lurking suspicion that Leonidas W. Smiley is a myth; that my