Kin Hubbard's Abe Martin: A Figure of Transition in American Humor
1982; Indiana University Press; Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1942-9711
Autores Tópico(s)Media, Gender, and Advertising
ResumoDuring the first three decades of the twentieth century one of America's most important humorists was Indiana's Frank McKinney Kin Hubbard, creator of Martin. For twenty-five years, from 1904 to 1930, the comic sayings of Martin and his neighbors in Brown County in southern Indiana were highlights of the newspaper to millions of Americans. By 1910 the Abe Martin mania had so enthralled the country that there were Martin cigars, overalls, cookies, whiskey, porch-furniture, lead pencils and moving picture theatres . . . ,1 At the time of Hubbard's death in 1930 his humorous com ments were nationally syndicated in more than three hundred newspapers and magazines.2 Hubbard's Abe Martin appeared during the waning years of the crackerbarrel ascendancy in American humor. The nineteenth-century crackerbarrel figure traditionally focused on political involvement, rural residency, the fatherly image, em ployment, and success. Above all else he was a capable figure in a world still based in eighteenth-century rationalism. If problems arose, common sense and past experience would be enough to make any life well ordered again. The inability to cope with a dilemma was an individual rather than a societal
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