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Elliott Mills

Bays

English 3 CP

23 January 2017

Tall Tale Vs. Historical Fiction

The genre of the tall tale is a story that has been passed around by many different people

and has been exaggerated and stretched to almost an unbelieve proportions. Mark Twain uses

exaggeration in The Famous Jumping Frog of Calaveras County to greatly display the

characteristics of the genre tall tale. The genre historical fiction pulls factual events and throws in

fictional characters and, in some cases, the settings into a story. Both of these stories rely on one

simple thing...facts. There are some truths to the genres in historical fiction, the author takes

actual events and throws in his/her own ideas therefore making it fictional. With tall tales as

ridiculous as they may seem, they have some truths to them. A person starts off by telling a story

that really happened, and the story gets told over and over till it just seems so ridiculous and

insane that no one will believe that it would have happened. Both authors portray tall tales and

historical fiction.

Historical fiction stories are based around significant historical events such as World War

II or the segregation in the 50s and 60s. The author would put in characters such as a boy who

had just been drafted or a young African American boy or girl fighting for his or her rights to

equality. The author would give the character a fictional name and backstory and have the
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character interact with factual characters such as actual military generals, or even civil rights

leaders such as Rosa Parks or Martin Luther King Junior.

Tall tales are stories that are told over and over again that get stretched and changed to

where they become something so far from the truth that its hard to believe or is even laughable.

Other names for tall tales could include but are not limited to, wives tales or urban legends. The

most common example of a tall tale is a tale about a man who caught a foot long fish, he goes

and tells his friends that it was a foot and a half. At this point it is completely believable, the

friend goes on to tell another friend that a man he knew caught a 3 foot fish, and this friend is so

amazed he goes and tells another friend, but this time he says it was a shark. As the story is told

more and more, it becauses less and less believable.

Both genres are factual and fictional in the sense that they have some sort of truth to them

or they started off truthful like the fish story. Historical fiction uses real events and fictional

characters or vise versa while a tall tale starts with a true story but slowly grows to a story that is

so fake and so ridiculous that no one would ever believe it. They are different in the sense that

historical fiction is deliberately changed and everyone knows it was meant to be this way while

in tall tales no one knows that the story is being changed and stretched.