Charles Ferrar Browne, also known as Artemus Ward, was arguably the first humorist in the United States with a national reputation. Even Mark Twain himself called Ward America’s greatest humorist and described his 1863 Babes in the Wood lecture as the funniest thing he had ever heard. W.D. Howells also identified Ward as the person who first gave the world a taste of the humor that characterizes the whole American people.
A journalist who parlayed the success of his published letters into a successful career as the first comedic lecturer touring the nation, Ward brought prestige to American humor both nationally and abroad. Today, however, Ward’s literary reputation is largely forgotten. This book, therefore, brings Ward’s unique style of written humor and his lecturing success from the obscurity of the mid-nineteenth century into the significance of contemporary cultural studies. This work traces the growth of Ward’s literary reputation by examining the rhetorical quality of his gentle satire that made his humor so vastly popular in his time. It is mainly useful to scholars of American humor and to anyone who delights in the comic power of the written and spoken word.