William Tappan Thompson's contribution to American humor consists of his creation of the character Major Joseph Jones, a whimsical, vernacular-speaking, upper-middle-class planter from Pineville, Georgia, who is in turn buffoon and wise man. The voice of Major Jones first appeared in 1842 in a series of letters to Thompson himself, then editing a newspaper in Macon, and the best of these letters continue through two collections, Major Jones's Courtship (1843), the most popular of Thompson's books, and Major Jones's Sketches of Travel (1848). Thompson's humor reflects his Whig-minded views of society, and Major Jones, who names his first son Henry Clay, embodies those values. In Major Jones's Sketches of Travel, the congenial tone of the Pineville letters darkens somewhat as Jones travels through the North confronting evidence of abolitionists.

Thompson was born in Ravenna, Ohio. Both his parents, David, a Virginian, and Catharine Kerney, were dead by the time he was...