The Complete Works of Artemus Ward — Part 3: Stories and Romances

Charles Farrar BrowneProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.2

Word count: 64K words
Chapters: 7

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.The Complete Works of Artemus Ward — Part 3: Stories and Romances by Artemus WardAuthor: Ward, Artemus, 1834-1867,Language: English, Class: PS: Language and Literatures: American and Canadian literature, Release Date: Jun 1, 2002

Editor's review

This is Part 3 of the complete works of Artemus Ward, devoted to stories and romances. Ward was one of the representative figures of nineteenth-century American humor, whose signature technique was to create comedy through exaggeration, misspellings, colloquial slang, and absurd logic, while also conveying mild satire of the social mores, media, and popular tastes of his time. This part showcases his storytelling prowess: the pieces are short, fast-paced, and packed with punchlines, making it suitable introductory material for understanding the tradition of American local humor. Readers familiar with the humorous style of Mark Twain will find that the two share a similar linguistic soil. Note that the original is in English, and many of the jokes rest on nineteenth-century spelling conventions, dialects, and contemporary news events, so without annotations it is easy to be confused; moreover, some jokes carry the prejudices of their era and require critical distance when read today.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Readers who want to understand the newspaper humor tradition of nineteenth-century America
Light readers who enjoy short stories and casual reading
Writing enthusiasts who can dissect short-story structure and joke setup

Not a good fit for

Readers who prefer long-form continuous narrative and complex character arcs
Readers who need modern vernacular translations or detailed background annotations

Reading tips

Read only two or three pieces at a time, leaving time to appreciate how each story ends.
After finishing a piece, summarize the source of the humor in one sentence to train sensitivity to short-story structure.
Read alongside other volumes in the same series to compare the language differences between the epistolary and storytelling forms.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

FAQ

How does this volume differ from other volumes in the same series?

This volume is mainly short stories and legendary sketches, leaning toward narrative and fictional situations; other volumes in the series are mostly letters or speeches, with different genres and reading rhythms, and can be read together.

Is the story content suitable for young readers?

Most stories are short and humorous in language, but contain nineteenth-century colloquialisms and period context; young readers may need an adult to explain some expressions and situations, and should not read entirely independently.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Charles Farrar Browne Author · American · 1834–1867

Artemus Ward (1834–1867), whose real name was Charles Farrar Browne, was an American humorist born in Waterford, Maine. He worked early on as a typesetter and newspaper editor, and in 1858, in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, he created the ignorant traveling-show impresario “Artemus Ward.” Under that pen name he went on to publish writings and give stage lectures, gaining great fame. His works mostly use this character as narrator, generating humor through misspellings, faulty grammar, and naive boastfulness while satirizing the manners and follies of American society. The library holds eight of his works, including the various parts of The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, covering essays, stories, war subjects, a California travel account, and London correspondence. He died of illness in Southampton, England, in 1867 at the age of thirty-three.