[begin page 1]

The second volume of this collection follows Clemens from his first days as a resident journalist in California, late in May 1864, through the end of his first full year as a California resident, 1865. In this twenty-month period he wrote most of his work for the San Francisco Golden Era, the Morning Call, the Dramatic Chronicle, and the Californian. He began to publish somewhat more regularly in eastern journals, like the New York Saturday Pressand the Weekly Review, and toward the end of the period he started a long assignment as the daily correspondent from San Francisco to the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. In November 1865 he published “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog” (no. 119), and by the beginning of 1866 the news of its success with eastern readers had begun to filter back to California. He was on the verge of national and international fame as a humorist.

This period saw Clemens change his employment from daily reporter for the Call to weekly columnist for the Californian and back again to daily columnist for the Enterprise. Although the seventy-seven sketches collected here include some routine comic journalism and some minor masterpieces, there are also a number of false starts and experiments. The one recurrent problem that lends a rough coherence throughout is Clemens' apparent reluctance to accept his vocation as a humorist—a reluctance that he overcame gradually but emphatically with the “Jumping Frog” tale. His problem was not that he doubted his talent—the sketches themselves constitute an irrefutable body of evidence for that talent—but rather that he shared with many of his contemporaries, at least on some occasions, a low opinion of the humorist's calling. “Funny fellows are all right and good in their place,” said one such journalist, but “the sole supreme taste of the [begin page 2] public ought not to be in that direction.”1Condescension of this kind usually brought Clemens into a defensive posture, and there are several sketches reprinted here in which he simply rejects this common attitude. But his more important and enduring response was to write a body of comic journalism that explored the possibilities of his material and the limitations of his audience, and that answered the skeptics with a new kind of humor. The sketches included here contain, for example, his earliest experiments with the vernacular community and his relationship with it, and they document some of his earliest ventures into the rich vein of controlled incoherence that became his trademark.

The general circumstances of composition of the entire collection are described in the introduction in volume 1. The headnotes give more specific information of this kind, while the explanatory notes identify specific persons and events mentioned in the sketches. The textual introduction in volume 1 sets forth the history of revision and reprinting of all the texts; the headnotes briefly indicate how each individual piece fits into this broader history, which is recapitulated in the “Description of Texts” in the present volume. The individual textual commentaries give full details of revision and reprinting; the mechanics of their use are explained in the “Guide to the Textual Apparatus.”

E.M.B.

R.H.H.

August 1979