A true classic of American humor.
Joseph Glover Baldwin left his native Virginia as a young man in 1836 for the booming frontier of the Old Southwest, settling first in DeKalb, Mississippi, and then in 1839 in Gainesville and later Livingston, Sumter County, Alabama. Blessed with a lively imagination and a good library, Baldwin prospered as a local officeholder and attorney and produced a series of sketches for the "Southern Literary Messenger." These essays were gathered with others into this collection of 26 and published as a book in New York by D. Appleton and Company in 1853.
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This delightful divertissement is a lampoon of dueling culture set in southeastern Alabama, penned by a cousin of the better known humorist Johnson Jones Hooper. Interestingly George W. Hooper did not identify himself as the author, perhaps for fear that some enterprising duelist would decide he had been personally lampooned and take umbrage.The main character is a figure familiar in outline to readers of John Gorman Barr, J. J. Hooper, Joseph G. Baldwin, and other practitioners of what is known as the humor of the Old Southwest. This tetchy blowhard is able to find a personal slight in every...