Henry Clay Lewis is one of the most distinctive and intriguing of those writers classified as humorists of the Old Southwest. He is remembered as the creator of Madison Tensas, M.D., the Louisiana "Swamp Doctor." The Southwestern humorists, prominent among them Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, Johnson Jones Hooper, and, perhaps the best-known, George Washington Harris, portrayed frontier regions often characterized by raw humor, violence, and dialect. Lewis clearly followed that tradition, but there is in his work an uncommon pushing of the boundaries of what is humorous. Indeed, many of his sketches deal with subject matter so gruesome that the reader is left to question the source of the laughter evoked.

The publication of Odd Leaves from the Life of a Louisiana "Swamp Doctor" (1850) established his reputation as one of the most-popular Southwestern humorists, though the author's identity was unknown. The promise obvious in the collection was cut...