SOURCE: "The Infernal Reminiscence: Mythic Patterns in Mark Twain's 'The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County'," in Satire Newsletter, Vol. 1, No. 2, Spring, 1964, pp. 41-4.

In the following essay, Smith offers a fantastic reading of Twain's jumping frog sketch in the poker-faced manner of Simon Wheeler, leading other critics to observe that Smith's article is in part a humorous jibe at the state of literary scholarship.

Much critical effort has been spent on fixing the original date of Mark Twain's darker view of humanity; and as the years have progressed, inevitably, the terminus ad quem of his pessimism has regressed, ineluctably: first it was placed in the early 1900's, later in the 1880's with Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, still later (or rather earlier) with The Gilded Age and the 1870's when the age was, indeed, gilded. However valid some of this critical work has been, to this writer's mind...