Of obscure reputation in the twentieth century, except among a few scholars and writers, George Washington Harris had a large popular following in his own time, beginning in the 1840s. His Sut Lovingood sketches were printed and reprinted in newspapers and anthologies throughout the United States, and, as he himself put it, he took his stand among the nations of the earth in 1867, when Sut Lovingood. Yarns Spun by a "Nat'ral Born Durn'd Fool," the only volume of his work to appear during his lifetime, was published. While the New York Times was cool, Tennessee newspapers praised it extravagantly, and young Mark Twain commended it affectionately to Westerners. Later he and William Dean Howells included selections from the book in Mark Twain 's Library of Humor (1888). Among twentieth-century writers, Sut's admirers included Flannery O'Connor, Robert Penn Warren, Stark Young, and Stephen Longstreet. William Faulkner read and reread Harris...