The Wit and Humor of America (Vol. 1-10)
A Ten-Volume Anthology of American Satire, Tall Tales, Dialect Sketches, and Comic VerseBy O. Henry, Mark Twain, Washington Irving, Bret Harte, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Benjamin Franklin, Edward Everett Hale, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Kendrick Bangs, William Dean Howells, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Henry Ward Beecher, John G. Saxe, James Russell Lowell, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Robert W. Chambers, Edmund Clarence Stedman, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Wallace Irwin, Eugene Field, Anne Virginia Culbertson, John Paul, Lloyd Osbourne, James Montgomery Flagg, Bill Nye, Robert J. Burdette, Wilbur D. Nesbit, Gelett Burgess, James Whitcomb Riley, Frank L. Stanton, Bayard Taylor, Artemus Ward, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward, Charles Dudley Warner, Carolyn Wells, Owen Wister
Length56h 19m
About this audiobook
The Wit and Humor of America gathers ten volumes of American comic writing into a capacious archive of satire, burlesque, dialect sketch, parable, anecdote, verse, and social observation. Moving from early republican wit through nineteenth-century regionalism and the modern magazine sketch, it reveals humor as both entertainment and cultural criticism. Comic monologues, mock-heroic poems, and sharply observed tales sit beside enduring reflections on politics, manners, sentiment, class, and national self-invention. Its contributors encompass major essayists, poets, storytellers, reformers, journalists, and popular humorists whose careers span the formative decades of U.S. literary culture. The collection brings Transcendentalist moral irony, Gothic allegory, local-color vernacular, domestic satire, frontier exaggeration, and emerging urban comedy into productive relation. These varied voices illuminate how humor engaged abolition, gender conventions, democratic rhetoric, regional identity, and the expanding marketplace for print, while preserving the distinct idioms of American public life. Recommended for students, scholars, and general readers, this anthology offers an unusually broad opportunity to trace the development of American humor across genres and generations. Its ten-volume scope makes it valuable both as a literary resource and as a record of changing social attitudes. Readers will find not merely isolated jokes, but an ongoing dialogue about authority, belonging, language, and the comic possibilities of everyday experience.
Audiobook details
Rating★★★ 3.0 (23)
Includes Goodreads
GenreHumor, Literary Classics
Length56 hrs 19 mins
Narrated byListen with 1,000+ voices
FormateBook with Audio
Publish dateApr 27, 2024
LanguageEnglish
Table of contents
1History of the United States: A 30-Volume Anthology
26WOUTER VAN TWILLER
2VOLUME 1
27THE EXPERIENCES OF THE A.C.
3FOREWORD
28WHAT MR. ROBINSON THINKS
4ACKNOWLEDGMENT
29THE DAY WE DO NOT CELEBRATE
5THE WIT AND HUMOR OF AMERICA: MELONS
30THE YANKEE DUDE'LL DO
Show all chaptersShow less
6THE DEACON'S MASTERPIECE OR, THE WONDERFUL "ONE-HOSS SHAY"
31SPELLING DOWN THE MASTER
7THE PURPLE COW
32MYOPIA
8THE CURSE OF THE COMPETENT
33ANATOLE DUBOIS AT DE HORSE SHOW
9THE GRAMMATICAL BOY
34THE CHAMPION CHECKER-PLAYER OF AMERIKY
10SIMPLE ENGLISH
35DARBY AND JOAN
11PARTINGTONIAN PATCHWORK
36WHEN THE FROST IS ON THE PUNKIN
12THE MENAGERIE
37LAFFING
13DOWN AROUND THE RIVER
38GRIZZLY-GRU
14A MEDIEVAL DISCOVERER
39JOHN HENRY IN A STREET CAR
15WANTED—A COOK
40THE MUSKEETER
16SIMILAR CASES
41THE TURNINGS OF A BOOKWORM
17THE OLD MAID'S HOUSE: IN PLAN
42THE FEAST OF THE MONKEYS
18DISTICHS
43THE BILLVILLE SPIRIT MEETING
19THE QUARREL
44A CRY FROM THE CONSUMER
20A LETTER FROM MR. BIGGS
45A DISAPPOINTMENT
21MRS. JOHNSON
46THE BRITISH MATRON
22PASS
47THE TRAGEDY OF IT
23TEACHING BY EXAMPLE
48STAGE WHISPERS
24WHEN ALBANI SANG1
49THE PETTIBONE LINEAGE
25COLONEL STERETT'S PANTHER HUNT
50WHY MOLES HAVE HANDS
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