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What was meant by Artemus Ward and others who distinguished Haliburton as ‘the ‘father’ (or ‘founder’) of American humor,’ as the ‘creator of the American type in literature,’ as ‘the first American in literature,’ and Haliburton’s Sam Slick as ‘the typical American,’ was a three-fold distinction which these formulae do not truly express. First, Haliburton ‘naturalized’ in America a method of humor in dialect, so that it became the method of certain of his successors (Ward, Billings, Westcott, Dunne) and a method of exaggeration or humorous mendacity and comic characterization, so that it became the method of certain other successors (notably Mark Twain). Secondly, Haliburton ‘popularized’ his method of humor in dialect and his comic characterization, especially Sam Slick, so that they became accepted in England and Europe as peculiarly American—the one as the indigenously original American method of humor, and the other as the typical New Englander, whom the English cartoonists transmuted in caricature into ‘Uncle Sam,’ that is, into the embodiment of some typical American characteristics. Thirdly, though American (United States and British North America or Canadian) authors, Irving, Cooper, Richardson, who were contemporaries of Haliburton, had a vogue in England, Haliburton had produced satiric humor and comic characterization which were not only un-English in method and conception, but also so original as to be absolutely unlike any other humor and humorous characterization in the world. If any literature was, in substance and manner, strictly American, it was Haliburton’s humorous writings.

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