THE CONNECTION between American humor and the realistic movement has been well established, as the introductory essays of almost any anthology of American literature will show. The association is made partly through the career of Mark Twain. Despite its traditional exaggeration, the Southwest school, beginning with A. B. Longstreet's Georgia Scenes (I835), demonstrated certain realistic traits, a fact that has been pointed out many times.' Moreover the same techniques used by the humorists were hallmarks of the later realism: characters drawn in local environment; subjects taken from daily life; natural speech used in conversation. But it would be erroneous to assume a strong connection between most humorists of the latter part of the nineteenth century and certain realists, simply because the realistic movement had been influenced somewhat by the frontier humorists. The frontier humorists had been concerned both with creating amusing experiences and with depicting eccentric characters in their native environments. But the writers who followed them after the Civil War were split into two groups.2 Writing about personalities became the job of the local colorists, while a group of professional humorists, called by Walter Blair literary comedians, took over the amusement concession. This group, beginning with Artemus Ward, sold words rather than local character, and achieved laughter with devices such as phonetic spelling. These humorists, concerned as they were with words, gave much effort to burlesque and parody, and it was in this stead that they made their principal contribution to the realistic movement. Through their burlesques they satirized the sentimental themes and pretentious diction of romantic and historic fiction.3