The author of one major collection of fiction, George Washington Harris wrote in the tradition of Southwestern humor, with its comic exaggerations, tall tales, rural dialects, and democratic challenges to authority by backwoods tricksters. Popular in his lifetime but never a professional author, he was a businessman and minor political figure who wrote primarily for newspapers and magazines; his work ranged from playful sketches of rural Tennessee life to scathing political satire to the extravagant humor of his most enduring creation, Sut Lovingood, the protagonist of some fifty tales and the titular hero of Harris's 1867 collection Sut Lovingood. Yarns Spun by a "Nat'ral Born Durn'd Fool.["] Warped and Wove for Public Wear. Edmund Wilson, in his Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (1962), called the book "by far the most repellent book of any real literary merit in American literature," but generations of readers...