Throughout the 1880s and early 1890s, H. C. Bunner edited the most successful comic magazine in America--Puck. With Bunner as editor, Puck evolved from the English-language offshoot of a struggling comic weekly in German to a literary and satirical magazine wielding substantial social and political influence nationwide. None of the writing in Puck was more crucial in developing and maintaining its popularity than the material the editor himself provided. Readers appreciated the urbanity and wit of Bunner's poems, parodies, and short stories as subtler complements to the journal's biting, sometimes vicious, caricatures and editorials lampooning the social and political foolishness of the Gilded Age. Bunner's contributions to Puck and to other magazines were so popular that he published collections of his verse and fiction throughout his life. The most notable are his selection of poems titled Airs from Arcady and Elsewhere (1884), a volume of short fiction, "Short...