Mark Twain, or Samuel L. Clemens, his lesser known name by birth, has always been celebrated and famous for his Regionalist stories of life in the South near the Mississippi River near which he had grown up. He wrote entire novels, such as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, in the dialect of his native area, and he is probably the greatest as well as the most famous of all the Regionalist and Realist writers. While he did write as a Realist, his Regionalistic writings were what really got people’s attention. For example, here is an excerpt from a short story of his called “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” a story written richly with dialect:
“There was a feller here once by the name of Jim Smiley, in the winter of ‘49--or may be it was the spring of ‘50--I don’t recollect exactly, somehow, though what makes me think it was one or the other is because I remember the big flume wasn’t finished when he first came to the camp; but any way, he was the curiosest man about always betting on anything that turned up you ever see, if he could get any body to bet on the other side; and if he couldn’t he’d change sides” (Twain 499).
(TBC)
Works Cited
Twain, Mark. "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County." GlencoeLiterature. Ed. Jeffrey D. Wilhelm. American Literature ed. Columbus: McGraw-Hill, 2009. 498-502. Print.
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