Haliburton, Thomas Chandler - Daniel Royot (essay date 1985)
Daniel Royot (essay date 1985)
SOURCE: Royot, Daniel. “Sam Slick and American Popular Humour.” In The Thomas Chandler Haliburton Symposium, edited by Frank M. Tierney, pp. 123-33. Ottawa, Ont.: University of Ottawa Press, 1985.
[In the following essay, Royot discusses how Haliburton borrowed ideas from various frontier humorists to create Sam Slick and how Haliburton's writings influenced later American humorists.]
A retrospective view of the Clockmaker series makes it clear that Haliburton deliberately established a link between various brands of the American comic spirit. Resulting from his gleanings of folk humour, his achievements were ultimately conducive to a new genre combining oral tradition, popular culture, and literature, as later exemplified in Mark Twain's works. In this respect, the figure of Sam Slick amounts to a palimpsest which seems worth scrutinizing. Through Haliburton's persona New England and Southwestern...
[The entire page is 5069 words long]
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