Wit and Humor of America, Vol 06

America's greatest humorists gathered in one place. This is the wit and wisdom (and magnificent absurdity) of a young nation's finest comic minds - 42 writers across 55 stories and poems that defined what American humor could be. From the Mississippi to the Bowery, from the tall tale to the perfectly turned anecdote, these are the pieces that made Americans laugh when laughter was something close to subversion. In an age of earnestness and Victorian pomposity, the ability to see the ridiculous in the dignified, to skewer pretension with a well-placed punchline, to find glory in the ordinary and absurdity in the grand - that was its own kind of radical honesty. This volume collects the comic inheritance of a nation still learning to speak in its own voice, still discovering that sometimes the truest thing you could say was the funniest.