William Penn Adair Rogers, according to his biographers, was the last of the cracker-barrel philosophers, that tradition of American humor which includes Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, Marietta Holley, and Finley Peter Dunne and which evokes the image of rural types gathered about the cracker barrel of a general store, transfixed by a witty talker who keeps them chuckling while he sums up their thoughts in amusing tales and pungent aphorisms. "All I know is what I read in the papers"; variations on this sentence were often included in Rogers's monologues and articles. He made his reputation as an ordinary man who read the papers carefully and pointed out the ridiculous as well as the grimly humorous in the activities of the body politic. Calling himself the cowboy philosopher, he reached a huge audience through his lectures, films, stage plays, newspaper and magazine articles, books, and radio...