American Humor

A Study of the National Character

By Constance Rourke
Introduction by Greil Marcus

Stepping out of the darkness, the American emerges upon the stage of history as a new character, as puzzling to himself as to others. American Humor, Constance Rourke's pioneering "study of the national character," singles out the archetypal figures of the Yankee peddler, the backwoodsman, and the blackface minstrel to illuminate the fundamental role of popular culture in fashioning a distinctive American sensibility. A memorable performance in its own right, American Humor crackles with the jibes and jokes of generations while presenting a striking picture of a vagabond nation in perpetual self-pursuit. Davy Crockett and Henry James, Jim Crow and Emily Dickinson rub shoulders in a work that inspired such later critics as Pauline Kael and Lester Bangs and which still has much to say about the America of Bob Dylan and Thomas Pynchon, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

Reviews

American Humor has become a classic text of American scholarship, important in literary criticism, folklore, theater history, American studies, and popular culture. [Rourke's] theorizing has none of the sense of antiseptic removal from the world that has sometimes attached itself to literary study since the seventies. . . . One reads Rourke to find out where American literature came from, where it is going, and why.
— W.T. Lhamon Jr.

In every way a brilliant piece of work.
— Lewis Mumford

Also see:

The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual By Harold W. Cruse Introduction by Stanley Crouch A landmark work of African-American thought written in a period of immense social ferment.

Warlock By Oakley Hall Introduction by Robert Stone A twisted pulp epic, in which the fantasy world of the Western is revealed as the perverse unconscious of American life.

Sheppard Lee, Written by Himself By Robert Montgomery Bird Introduction by Christopher Looby The eponymous hero of this early-American picaresque climbs the social ladder by inhabiting the bodies of the recently deceased, assuming the identities of, among others, a country squire, a young man of fashion, and a slave.

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