The Urban Tall Tale in a Contemporary Key

FAIN: FR-10274-78

Sanford Pinsker
Franklin and Marshall College (Lancaster, PA 17603-2827)

To read much more deeply in Twain—clearly the pivotal figure in this study—to complete a forthcoming article entitled "The Urban Tall Tale: Frontier Humor in a Contemporary Key" which will appear in Comic Relief: Essays on American Humor (University of Illinois Press). "Tall tales" build themselves upon "exaggerations" of a very special sort, ones which insist that environment is less a naturalistic determiner than an occasion for wry embellishment. It is a characteristic of folk humorists.