H. E. Taliaferro is best known for a single book, Fisher's River (North Carolina) Scenes and Characters, by "Skitt," "Who Was Raised Thar" (1859), a collection of humorous sketches and tales in the tradition of antebellum Southern frontier humor, a subliterary mode which enjoyed popular currency between the 1830s and the end of the Civil War. Taliaferro, a Baptist preacher on the Alabama frontier for most of his adult life, never achieved the popular acclaim accorded authors such as Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, Johnson Jones Hooper, Thomas Bangs Thorpe, and George Washington Harris, whose works helped to shape the contours and to establish the conventions commonly associated with the school of Old Southwestern humor.

Hardin Edwards Taliaferro, christened Mark Hardin Taliaferro (pronounced Tolliver), was born 4 March 1811 on a farm on the Little Fisher River in Surry County, North Carolina, an area located in the northwestern section of the state bordering...