John Kendrick Bangs, as the invariable tripartite nomenclature on the spines of his many books might attest, was a genteel figure whose humorous writing is characterized by a gentle and, at times, unremitting wit, erudition, irony, and urbanity. He was not a reformer or satirist, but rather an entertainer; his humor was always pleasant, decorous, amusing, mollifying. The many volumes of light verse, casual essays, funny sketches, and fiction which he published over his long career were always well received and occasionally so popular as to compete with the best-selling books of their times--a testament perhaps not only to his own fertile cleverness and intelligence, but also to the general high tone and high-minded geniality of this period. Bangs shunned the horse-sense figure and regional dialect of his nineteenth-century predecessors and seemed unimpressed by his contemporaries, such as George Ade, who exploited for humorous purposes the slangy medium...