The book details just what mischief the young newspaper reporter was up to when, while representing the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise beginning in 1862, he decided to bend or disregard the usual rules of journalism. Unsuspecting readers making their way through long columns of solemn legislature resolutions or mining claims would come upon sudden appearances of drunken dialect, or whoppers so ridiculous that readers found themselves dared to call the author's bluff.
Some did. When Clemens left Virginia City two years later, he was fleeing possible arrest for violating an anti-dueling statute, having challenged a rival editor. Clemens had been accused of "unmanly public journalism", which he considered to be fighting words.
But what might have looked like one more failed mineral prospector leaving the Comstock Lode district was, in fact, a young man who had struck it rich in a very specific way. He had discovered a literary alter-ego whose articles assumed the straight-faced appearance of traditional newspaper journalism yet somehow detailed highly unlikely frontier curiosities—petrified men, or bloody massacres committed by settlers holding worthless mining stocks.
Such stories were not that far removed from later tales, told by the same author, one of which involved a jumping frog.
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