25 pages • 50 minutes read
Mark TwainA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Jim Smiley is an inveterate gambler during California’s Gold Rush days whom Simon Wheeler recalls in excruciating detail. Smiley will bet on anything, to the point where he irritates people, but he is unbothered and obsessed with making wagers. To ingratiate himself with a bettor, Smiley will gladly switch sides on a bet; somehow, he wins anyway. This is not because he is a con artist; instead, it is due to his enthusiastic understanding of all the possibilities—or so claims Simon Wheeler.
Part of the fun of the Jim Smiley story is the possibility that he really is the Leonidas Smiley sought by the Narrator but living under a slightly different name or a nickname. It helps that this Smiley displays a cheerful innocence about others, something that might make sense in a gambler if he were formerly a parson. This lingering possibility helps keep the Narrator, and the reader, enthralled by Wheeler’s depiction of Smiley’s absurd games of chance. In an early version of the story, Smiley’s name was changed to Greeley—a play on “greedy”—but Twain later changed it back to Smiley, a moniker that evokes the character’s innocent friendliness.
By Mark Twain
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
Mark Twain
A True Story
Mark Twain
Letters from the Earth
Mark Twain
Life on the Mississippi
Mark Twain
Roughing It
Mark Twain
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Mark Twain
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Mark Twain
The Autobiography of Mark Twain
Mark Twain
The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today
Mark Twain, Charles Dudley Warner
The Innocents Abroad
Mark Twain
The Invalid's Story
Mark Twain
The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg
Mark Twain
The Mysterious Stranger
Mark Twain
The Prince and the Pauper
Mark Twain
The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson
Mark Twain
The War Prayer
Mark Twain