One of America's favorite parodists at the turn of the century, Carolyn Wells produced light verse and humorous articles that appeared in many little magazines as well as the popular magazines and comic papers of the late 1890s and the early twentieth century. Wells was considered the chief woman humorist of the first two decades of the 1900s and collections of her rhymes were best-sellers, as were her distinctive anthologies of humorous verse. An admirer of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, she was directly inspired by Gelett Burgess and Oliver Herford, and in the course of her career, she became acquainted with most of the popular humorists of the period, both in America and England. Her output and reputation were so prodigious that, as one reviewer stated, "to begin a sentence sharply with 'Carolyn Wells says' is to attract the attention of a whole tableful and silence any...