Sketches New and Old

This collection gathers Mark Twain's early comic pieces, including the story that first made him famous, 'The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County', in which a gambler's champion frog is beaten by a stranger who fills it with quail shot. Twain adds a French translation of the story and his own word-for-word translation back into English, to show how absurd it sounds. Other pieces include 'Journalism in Tennessee', where a newspaper office is a battlefield, the stories of the good little boy and the bad little boy, and a family's panic over a child's sore throat.

Twain published the book in 1875, bringing together sketches written over a decade of journalism in the American West and East. They show the deadpan exaggeration that runs through all his work. His travel humour is at its best in The Innocents Abroad and Roughing It.

Samuel Clemens (1835–1910) grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, on the banks of the Mississippi, and worked as a printer's apprentice, a steamboat pilot, a silver prospector in Nevada and a newspaper reporter before he became Mark Twain. A comic story about a jumping frog made his name in 1865, and his lectures and travel books made him the most famous American writer of his time.

He drew on his boyhood for The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and on his piloting years for Life on the Mississippi. Late in life he lost his fortune in bad investments and paid his debts with a lecture tour around the world. He was born in a year of Halley's Comet and died when it returned.