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Artemus Ward. Edition No. 1
VDM Publishing House, March 2009, Pages: 72
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.
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