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    A Study Guide for Mark Twain's "The Californians Tale"
    A Study Guide for Mark Twain's "The Californians Tale"
    A Study Guide for Mark Twain's "The Californians Tale"
    Ebook37 pages27 minutes

    A Study Guide for Mark Twain's "The Californians Tale"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Mark Twain's "The Californians Tale," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateJul 27, 2016
    ISBN9781535835596
    A Study Guide for Mark Twain's "The Californians Tale"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Mark Twain's "The Californians Tale" - Gale

      11

      The Californian's Tale

      Mark Twain

      1893

      Introduction

      Mark Twain is commonly regarded as the greatest American writer. Herman Melville might have written more profound works, but Twain has the advantage of being more thoroughly, more archetypically American in his character. Twain's stories often take place in colorful local American settings with the presentation of accurately, even lovingly, observed dialectical speech. The Californian's Tale is not among Twain's better-known stories, though it originates in the gold fields of California where Twain worked as a reporter during the Civil War, the same setting as The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County (1865), the story that launched Twain to national prominence as a writer. The Californian's Tale, however, remained a brief sketch in Twain's notebook from that time until 1892. It indulges in a sentimentality of the kind Twain so often satirizes in his other works. Recently the story has become a centerpiece in the reevaluation of Twain's attitudes about race.

      The Californian's Tale was first published in 1893 in The First Book of the Author's Club: Liber Scriptorum, an experimental volume that might have become the first work in a subscription series (one of many money-making schemes Twain attempted at this time) if it had proved more successful. The story is better known from its republication in Twain's 1906 anthology The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories.

      Author Biography

      Samuel Langhorne Clemens (who wrote as Mark Twain) was born on November 30, 1835, in Florida, Missouri. He grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, on the Mississippi River, where his father was a judge. After the death of his father when Twain was eleven years old, he worked a variety of jobs, including typesetting, and wrote for the newspaper in Hannibal, which was edited by his brother, Orion Clemens. Twain educated himself during this period of his life by reading in public lending libraries. Twain's first great ambition in life was to work as a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi. He achieved this goal and later found inspiration from it for his pen name, Mark Twain. A crewman on a riverboat would measure the river's depth with a rope marked in fathoms (lengths of six feet) and call back the information to the pilot. Mark Twain meant two fathoms, the

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