included here, at any rate. Not only copyright restrictions but in a
measure my own opinion have combined to exclude anything by Joel
Chandler Harris--_Uncle Remus_--from the collection. Harris is
primarily--in his best work--a humorist, and only secondarily a short
story writer. As a humorist he is of the first rank; as a writer of
short stories his place is hardly so high. His humor is not mere
funniness and diversion; he is a humorist in the fundamental and large
sense, as are Cervantes, Rabelais, and Mark Twain.

No book is duller than a book of jokes, for what is refreshing in
small doses becomes nauseating when perused in large assignments.
Humor in literature is at its best not when served merely by itself
but when presented along with other ingredients of literary force in
order to give a wide representation of life. Therefore "professional
literary humorists," as they may be called, have not been much
considered in making up this collection. In the history of American
humor there are three names which stand out more prominently than all
others before Mark Twain, who, however, also belongs to a wider
classification: "Josh Billings" (Henry Wheeler Shaw, 1815-1885),
"Petroleum V. Nasby" (David Ross Locke, 1833-1888), and "Artemus Ward"
(Charles Farrar Browne, 1834-1867). In the history of American humor
these names rank high; in the field of American literature and the
American short story they do not rank so high. I have found nothing of
theirs that was first-class both as humor and as short story. Perhaps
just below these three should be mentioned George Horatio Derby
(1823-1861), author of _Phoenixiana_ (1855) and the _Squibob Papers_
(1859), who wrote under the name "John Phoenix." As has been justly
said, "Derby, Shaw, Locke and Browne carried to an extreme numerous
tricks already invented by earlier American humorists, particularly
the tricks of gigantic exaggeration and calm-faced mendacity, but they