The Comic Imagination in American Literature

American humor American literature amusing appeared Artemus Ward audience Barth Bierce black humor blackface Bostonians burlesque Byrd Cabell Cabell's called century characters Civil comedy comic critical culture dialect E. B. White early England English essays fact Faulkner fiction Flem Snopes Franklin frontier George Washington Harris H. L. Mencken Harlem Hawthorne Henry Holmes Hop-Frog human humorists ideal imagination incongruity Irving James Jeeter Jewish humor joke kind language later laugh laughter letters Lewis light verse literary live magazine Mark Twain Melville Mencken ment mind minstrel Miss misspellers mode moral narrator native Negro novel play poem political Puritan reader reality Renaissance ridicule rural satire scene sense sexual sketch Snopes social society speech story Strether Suggs tale Tarwater tell things tion town tradition truth turn vernacular Walker Percy Washington Irving William Faulkner words writers wrote Yankee Yorker young