The Lady, or the Tiger?

Following the War of 1812, American authors sought to distance themselves from British cultural norms and set out to create a distinctly American literary identity. Writers like Washington Irving, George Washington Harris, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and later Mark Twain founded a new tradition of American humor that was rooted in realist fiction. Generally, this new American humor was characterized by its representation of regional customs and dialects, and the celebration of the cultural variety of the different states.

Frank R. Stockton, who took part in the 19th-century effort to develop an American body of literature, borrowed from different narrative traditions such as folk tales, children’s stories, and literary satire. His short stories, at once irreverent and humorous, investigate power, justice, and violence while avoiding didactic moralizing. The humor in Stockton’s tales is often driven by their exaggerated tone, which emphasizes the storyteller—or the form—as much as the content of the story.

Twain’s attempt to define 19th-century American humor recalls the qualities of Stockton’s storytelling: “The humorous story is American, the comic story is English, the witty story is French. The humorous story depends for its effect upon the manner of the telling; the comic story and the witty story upon the matter” (Twain, Mark.