This collection brings together representative American short stories that balance the formal requirements of brief fiction with a pronounced humorous spirit. The volume spans the nineteenth century and reaches into the twentieth, tracing the development of domestic humor, local color, and vernacular wit across various regions of the United States. The editor deliberately excludes professional jokebooks and mere funnymen, seeking instead stories where humor serves as an organic component of a wider representation of life. The survey begins before Mark Twain, noting earlier humorists such as Josh Billings, Petroleum V.
Nasby, and Artemus Ward, alongside local colorists like Augustus Baldwin Longstreet and Richard Malcolm Johnston, who captured the racy dialect and manners of the Southern frontier. Washington Irving and Edgar Allan Poe represent distinct veins of reminiscence and satire, while later nineteenth-century writers like Bret Henry Cuyler Bunner and Frank Richard Stockton advanced the mechanical perfection and whimsicality of the form. The collection also includes stories by masters of the twentieth-century short story, notably O.
Henry, whose New York tales blend sentiment, philosophy, and surprise endings. Each selected piece reflects a specific period and regional texture, from the middle-western clearings described by Caroline Kirkland to the bustling energy of O. Henry's metropolis. Ultimately, the volume serves as both a historical overview and a treasury of American literary invention, demonstrating how humor evolved from broad frontier exaggeration into a subtle and polished art.
