Indebted to both the oral tradition and the literary culture, "The Big Bear of Arkansas" is a short story of considerable sophistication. Its author, Thomas Bangs Thorpe (1815–1878), first published the work in the Spirit of the Times (27 March 1841), the sporting weekly edited by William T. Porter (1809–1858) where much of the best contemporary humor appeared. Porter reprinted Thorpe's tale in an anthology whose title emphasizes its preeminence: The Big Bear of Arkansas and Other Sketches, Illustrative of Characters and Incidents in the South and Southwest (1845). Thorpe republished the story himself in a collection of his tales and sketches, The Hive of "The Bee-Hunter" (1854). He belongs to a group of American authors active during the middle third of the nineteenth century and known as the humorists of the Old Southwest. This group, which included Augustus Baldwin Longstreet (1790–1870) and George Washington...