The Killing of Julius Caesar "Localized"

by Mark Twain

Mark Twain's seventh contribution to The Californian, "The Killing of Julius Caesar 'Localized,'" ran on November 12, 1864, and he liked the story well enough to reprint it three years later in his first book, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches.
Twain's parody cuts two knocking Shakespeare down to size and at the same time imitating the kind of sensationalist newspaper coverage of murders so popular at the time (and to which he himself had contributed when writing for The Morning Call). Twain had been toying with Shakespeare parodies from the outset of his writing career.

10 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 21, 2022

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

Samuel Langhorne Clemens, known by the pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer, humorist and essayist. He was praised as the "greatest humorist the United States has produced," with William Faulkner calling him "the father of American literature." His novels include The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), with the latter often called the "Great American Novel." Twain also wrote A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) and Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894), and co-wrote The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873) with Charles Dudley Warner.

Reviews

[Niklas Zenius Jespersen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ideen er sjov, men selve udførslen er ikke så interessant.

[Forked Radish · Rating 3 out of 5]

The politics of two millennia past were just like the skunks of two millennia past; no less stinky than today's version, maybe even more so.