GREAT ANNIVERSARY OF A TALL TALE BY THE FIRST THOROUGHLY AMERICAN WRITER

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to remind the readership that these days mark the 150th anniversary of publication of “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County“, Mark Twain’s short story that in 1867 gave its title to his own first book. To be remembered is also the fact that Mark Twain was the first thoroughly American writer, who, unlike his literary predecessors and contemporaries, by conscious choice turned his back upon Europe. He held no reverence for ancient institutions and customs of the Old World and refused to celebrate its art, history, and cultural tradition. Accordingly, he also rejected the established patterns and conventions of English literature that shaped American writing up to the Civil War. He turned to his native land seeking to explore its resources in the realm of subject matter and language, as American reality of his days offered him rich material for story telling. His American types, localities, problems and situations are presented with vividness and familiarity of the first-hand experience, joined by his resolute experiment in language – he was the first to investigate the possibilities that
American idiom offered for serious writing. He found the colloquial speech of common Americans a flexible, colourful, although sometimes vulgar, medium of expression, more stimulating than the intricate examples of educated and polite British English.