Like other antebellum humorists of the Old Southwest, Johnson Jones ("Jonce") Hooper earned a livelihood through a variety of occupations. In his careers as lawyer, newspaper editor, state solicitor, and secretary and librarian of the Provisional Congress of the Confederate States of America, Hooper found little time to devote to the writing of humorous stories, creating only two volumes of such writings. Nevertheless, one of those volumes, Some Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs, went through eleven editions within eleven years after its first publication and gained widespread fame for its author before the Civil War. Today the humorous antihero of that work, Simon Suggs--the quintessential frontier rogue and con man--is considered one of the finest examples of comic characterization in antebellum literature; and the sardonic brand of humor in the Suggs sketches is echoed in the writings of other later authors as diverse as Herman Melville, Mark Twain...