ALIAS SIMON SUGGS

The biography of an early American humorist, Johnson Jones Hooper, whose fame, at first local, soon became nationwide and later international with the recognition of his farcical but realistic creation, Simon Suggs. As such it traces the course of indigenous American humor as it was expressed from pioneer and frontier sources, as it was founded on folk and picaresque tall tales, and as it influenced later writers. From wealth to poverty, from the civilized coast to the newly opened lands of Alabama, Hooper found his success as he went from law to journalism when his first Suggs story was picked up by Spirit of the Times, a sporting and political paper in New York City and his comic relief found its way to wide popularity. Suggs overshadowed Hooper even when he was the first secretary and librarian of the Provisional Congress of the Confederate States of America and with Hooper's early death and the changes brought about by the Civil War, Simon Suggs dropped out of sight. Of literary and bibliophilic interest primarily since it is not of the same biographical stripe as the recent The Great Rascal by Jay Monaghan (P. 655, 1951) in its popular appeal.