A History of American Literature Since 1870

by Fred Lewis Pattee

VIII

The great tide of comic writings became fast and furious in the seventies. In 1872 no fewer than nine comic papers were established in New York alone: The Brickbat, The Cartoon, Frank Leslie's Budget of Fun, The Jolly Joker, Nick-nax, Merryman's Monthly, The Moon, The Phunny Fellow, The Thistle, and perhaps others. Some died after the first issue, some persisted longer. Every year saw its own crop of comics rise, flourish and die. In 1877 Puck was established, the first really successful comic paper in America; in 1881 appeared Judge; and in 1883 Life, the first to succeed without politics.

Very little of all this humorous product can be called literature; the greater part of it already has passed into oblivion; yet for all that the movement that produced it cannot be neglected by one who would study the period. The outburst of humor in the sixties and the seventies was indeed significant. Poor though the product may have been, it was American in background and spirit, and it was drawn from no models save life itself. For the first time America had a national literature in the broad sense of the word, original and colored by its own soil. The work of every one in the school was grounded in sincerity. The worker saw with his own eyes and he looked only for truth. He attacked sentimentality and gush and all that was affected and insincere. Born of the great moral awakening of the war, the humor had in it the Cervantes spirit. Nast, for instance, in his later years declared, "I have never allowed myself to attack anything I did not believe in my soul to be wrong and deserving of the worst fate that could befall it." The words are significant. The laughter of the period was not the mere crackling of thorns under a pot, not a mere fusillade of quips and puns; there was depth in it and purpose. It swept away weakness and wrongs. It purged America and brought sanity and health of soul. From the work of the humorists followed the second accomplishment of the period: those careful studies in prose and verse of real life in the various sections of America.

BIBLIOGRAPHY[24]

George Horatio Derby. (1823–1861.) Phœnixiana, or Sketches and Burlesques by John Phœnix, N. Y. 1855; The Squibob Papers, N. Y. 1859; Phœnixiana, or Sketches and Burlesques by John Phœnix. Introduction by John Kendrick Bangs. Illustrated by Kemble. N. Y. 1903.

Charles Farrar Browne. (1834–1867.) Artemus Ward, His Book. N. Y. 1862; Artemus Ward, His Travels. 1. Miscellaneous. 2. Among the Mormons, N. Y. 1865; Betsey Jane Ward. Hur Book of Goaks. N. Y. 1866; Artemus Ward in London and Other Papers. N. Y. 1867; Artemus Ward's Panorama as Exhibited in Egyptian Hall, London. Edited by his executors, T. W. Robertson and E. P. Hingston. N. Y. 1869; The Genial Showman, London, 1870; Artemus Ward, His Works Complete, with a biographical sketch by M. D. Landon. N. Y. 1875; The Complete Works of Artemus Ward. London. 1910.

David Ross Locke. (1833–1888.) Divers Views, Opinions, and Prophecies of Yours Trooly, Petroleum V. Nasby. 1865; Nasby Papers. With an Introduction by G. A. Sala. London. 1866; Swingin' Round the Cirkle. By Petroleum V. Nasby. His Ideas of Men, Politics, and Things, During 1866. Illustrated by Thomas Nast. Boston. 1867; Ekkoes from Kentucky. By Petroleum V. Nasby. Illustrated by Thomas Nast. Boston. 1868; The Struggles (Social, Financial, and Political) of Petroleum V. Nasby. With an Introduction by Charles Sumner. Illustrated by Thomas Nast. Boston. 1872; Nasby in Exile. Toledo. 1882.

Thomas Nast. (1840–1902.) Thomas Nast. His Period and His Pictures. By Albert Bigelow Paine. 1904; Life and Letters of Thomas Nast, Albert Bigelow Paine, 1910.

Henry Wheeler Shaw. Josh Billings: His Sayings. New York. 1865; Josh Billings on Ice and Other Things. N. Y. 1868; Josh Billings' Farmers' Allmanax for the Year 1870. N. Y. 1870; Old Probabilities; Contained in One Volume. Farmers' Allmanax 1870–1880. N. Y. 1879; Josh Billings' Old Farmers' Allmanax, 1870–1879. N. Y. 1902; Complete Comic Writings of Josh Billings with biographical introduction. Illustrated by Thomas Nast. N. Y.; Life of Henry W. Shaw, by F. B. Smith. 1883.

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[CHAPTER III]
MARK TWAIN

With Mark Twain, American literature became for the first time really national. He was the first man of letters of any distinction to be born west of the Mississippi. He spent his boyhood and young manhood near the heart of the continent, along the great river during the vital era when it was the boundary line between known and unknown America, and when it resounded from end to end with the shouts and the confusion of the first great migration from the East; he lived for six thrilling years in the camps and the boom towns and the excited cities of Nevada and California; and then, at thirty-one, a raw product of the raw West, he turned his face to the Atlantic Coast, married a rare soul from one of the refined families of New York State, and settled down to a literary career in New England, with books and culture and trips abroad, until in his old age Oxford University could confer upon him—"Tom Sawyer," whose schooling in the ragged river town had ended before he was twelve—the degree that had come to America only as borne by two or three of the Brahmins of New England. Only America, and America at a certain period, could produce a paradox like that.

Mark Twain interpreted the West from the standpoint of a native. The group of humorists who had first brought to the East the Western spirit and the new laughter had all of them been reared in the older sections. John Phœnix and Artemus Ward and Josh Billings were born in New England, and Nasby and many of the others were natives of New York State. All of them in late boyhood had gone West as to a wonderland and had breathed the new atmosphere as something strange and exhilarating, but Mark Twain was native born. He was himself a part of the West; he removed from it so as to see it in true perspective, and so became its best interpreter. Hawthorne had once expressed a wish to see some part of America "where the damned shadow of Europe has never fallen." Mark Twain spent his life until he was thirty in such unshadowed places. When he wrote he wrote without a thought of other writings; it was as if the West itself was dictating its autobiography.