The Celebrated Jumping Frog
1865

picture courtesy of "Mark Twain in His Times"

Angel's Camp, California (source of inspiration and site of actual writing) "Coleman with his jumping frog--bet stranger $50--stranger had no frog, & C got him one--in the meantime stranger filled C's frog full of shot & he couldn't jump--the stranger's frog won. [later added: Wrote this story for Artemus [Ward--his idiot publisher, Carleton gave it to Clapp's Saturday Press.] journal entry, January [and November] 1865, Angel's Camp [and San Francisco], as quoted in Mark Twain's Notebooks and Journals, Vol. 1 "You remember the one gleam of jollity that shot across our dismal sojourn in the rain and mud of Angel's Camp. I mean the day we sat around the tavern stove and heard that chap tell about the frog and how they filled him with shot.  And you remember how we quoted from the yarn and laughed over it out there on the hillside while you and Stoker panned and washed. I jotted the story down in my notebook that day and would have been glad to get ten or fifteen dollars for it...I published that story and it became widely known...and the reputation it made for me has paid me thousands and thousands of dollars since...I went heavily into debt, never could have dared to do that, Jim, if we hadn't heard the Jumping Frog story that day." letter to Jim Gillis, 1.26.1870, Elmira, New York, as quoted in The Selected Letters of Mark Twain

San Francisco, California (site of actual writing) "When Artemus Ward passed through California on a lecturing tour in 1865 or '66, I told him the Jumping Frog story in San Francisco and he asked me to write it out and send it to his publisher, Carleton, in New York." Autobiography, 166