ffred's
nearly-forgotten treasures...we presume that the beau-ideal of a political character...
would be, one who would come at the truth by a "cut off "—separate
and pile up falsehood for decay like the trees of a "raft:" and do all
this with the politeness of a "sawyer"—and with principles
unyielding as a "snag."
—"The Mississippi."
After imbibing the dry literary cocktails of Elizabeth Stoddard, and splashing on the eccentric Bohemian after-shave of William North, let us now relax on the easy-going front porch of Thomas Bangs Thorpe. Born twenty years before Mark Twain, hailing from a time when the term "Southwest" typically referred to Louisiana or Arkansas, this naturalist and humorist first caught my eye in The Knickerbocker Gallery.
Many of the stories in The Mysteries of the Backwoods [1846] are revised and reprinted in this 1855 collection. I had considered consolidating the two publications, but the latter seemed so perfectly contained, that I decided to focus solely on it.
The text of this edition is taken from this e-text at UNC's Library of Southern Literature [yet another online resource to be treasured], and checked and corrected against this scan. Italics and special characters are restored. Explicit references to page numbers are removed. Superfluous illustrations [and the reference thereof on the title page] are also omitted; only figures actually contained within the narrative are preserved.
So here it is: the master HTML version, the home-brew Kindle version, and the actual Amazon publication.
November 18, 2019