Charles Bertrand Lewis (M. Quad) was a journalist and humorist who, along with other newspaper "Phunny Phellows" of the late nineteenth century, appealed to a popular audience enamored with burlesque and verbal caricature. Like other columnist wits such as James M. Bailey (Danbury News Man) in Connecticut and Robert J. Burdette (Burlington Hawkeye Man) in Iowa, Lewis was chiefly identified with one newspaper--the Detroit Free Press. Like Charles Henry Smith (Bill Arp) and Charles Farrar Browne (Artemus Ward), Lewis was fully identified with his comic narrator, M. Quad. Unlike many of the Literary Comedians of his day, however, Lewis's narrator focused on reportorial style and comic wordplay rather than on regional types; he took the "ordinary scene and describe[d] it true to life." In his topical or domestic sketches, says Walter Blair, Quad was able to "picture with recognizable truth the life of the middle-class American in...