he 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
are plainly in the main channel of American humor, which had its
origin in the first comments of settlers upon the conditions of the
frontier, long drew its principal inspiration from the differences
between that frontier and the more settled and compact regions of the
country, and reached its highest development in Mark Twain, in his
youth a child of the American frontier, admirer and imitator of Derby
and Browne, and eventually a man of the world and one of its greatest
humorists."[2] Nor have such later writers who were essentially
humorists as "Bill Nye" (Edgar Wilson Nye, 1850-1896) been considered,
because their work does not attain the literary standard and the short
story standard as creditably as it does the humorous one. When we come
to the close of the nineteenth century the work of such men as "Mr.