The Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain Read Online Free

Europe hovers over the East.
    It seems to me that the West will produce a great and fertile literature and that this literature, although it will be free in tone and speech in a way the New England literature could not be, will nevertheless be sophisticated, will know what it is about, will understand the meaning of heritage and tradition as well as of rebellion, and of its place in the great stream of literature and the arts. That it has not come into its own during the last half century need not be held against it. Its practitioners are unfortunately parochial, and either unnecessarily resentful of the East or afraid of it. Perhaps the greatest and most successful users of western materials will not be westerners at all. They need not be. They may very well be easterners, for that matter.
    Twain’s personal influence during his lifetime was very great. His literary influence has also been considerable, not only among humorists but also among American novelists. Hemingway’s prose of action and his language of speech are direct descendants of Twain’s. Hemingway himself has said that American literature begins with one book,
Huckleberry Finn
—an obvious exaggeration in his fashion, but indicative of his regard for Twain. Twain is a muscular writer, he is par excellence the writer who calls a spade a spade, the writer who is intent on making an accurate correspondence between reality as he has experienced it and reality as it emerges in his books. This too is what Hemingway is after. It is Hemingway’s real passion. What makes him great is that he has had the vision to sense where in this complex world he can come to grips with what, for him, is a real experience; the courage to seek these places out and, in James’s term, saturate himself in them; and the passion to find the words—the fresh words, in his own style—to fit his experience. Like Twain, Hemingway gives the impression of being only incidentally a great writer. The writing follows upon his life. This is far from the example of James and Flaubert, who seemed to live only for their work and whose passion, morality, intelligence, and religion were dissolved and sacrificed in their work.
    Twain’s fashion has dimmed in the last forty years. He is seen to belong to another era, the era of chromos and linsey-woolsey, of an extraordinary optimism, of a degree of national self-criticism rarely now enjoyed. Despite his frontier manliness he is too frilly, too juvenile, too surrounded by females to entirely please the national taste. But he is a solid monument in American letters and an invaluable lesson for our young novelists. That lesson is: do not neglect your native sources; remember that yesterday’s journalism may become tomorrow’s literature; steep yourself in the living speech; and do not forget that the life of humor is long and that the Muse does not insist you wear a frown when you work.
    C HARLES N EIDER
Pacific Palisades

California

THE NOTORIOUS JUMPING FROG OF CALAVERAS COUNTY
                                                                                                                                       
    I N 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 friend never knew such a personage; and that he only conjectured that if I asked old Wheeler about him, it would remind him of his infamous
Jim
Smiley, and he would go to work and bore me to death with some exasperating reminiscence of him as long and as tedious as it should be useless to me. If that was the design, it succeeded.
    I found Simon Wheeler dozing comfortably by the barroom