Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Walcott Boynton, Reader's History of American Literature

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[242] East by an Eastern woman, though the materials were collected during a residence of nearly twenty years in the middle West.

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The “humorists.”

The first definite intellectual product of the Great West was a swarm of “humorists,” political and otherwise, who were let loose over the land to set it laughing, sometimes in a good cause, sometimes in a bad one.

Nothing used to strike an American more, on his first visit to England thirty years ago, than the frequent discussion of American authors who were rarely quoted at home, except in stump-speeches, whose works had no place as yet in our literary collections, but who were still taken seriously among educated persons in England. The astonishment increased when he found the almanacs of “Josh Billings” reprinted in “Libraries of American humor,” and given an equal place with the writings of Holmes and Lowell. Finally he may have been driven to the extreme conclusion that there must be very little humor in England, where things were seriously published in book form, which here would never get beyond the corner of a newspaper. He found that the whole department