Although his work is seldom read or anthologized today, Charles Heber Clark, who wrote under the pseudonym Max Adeler, was a highly successful Literary Comedian, as were his contemporaries Charles H. Smith (Bill Arp), Henry Wheeler Shaw (Josh Billings), and Edgar W. (Bill) Nye. The Literary Comedians differed from earlier American humorists in their increased use of amusing verbal devices: misspellings, regional and ethnic dialect, distorted grammar, mangled quotations, neologisms, and literary burlesques. Theirs is a comedy, as Walter Blair has observed, "of phraseology rather than of character." The aim of such comedy is the continuous amusement of the reader, and in that attempt Clark prospered. Nearly one million copies of his works were sold during his lifetime.

Born in Berlin, Maryland, Clark was the son of the Reverend Mr. William J. Clark, an Episcopalian clergyman with abolitionist sympathies. Clark received his early education in the Georgetown section...