SOURCE: Weber, Brom. “The Mode of ‘Black Humor.’” In The Comic Imagination in American Literature, edited by Louis D. Rubin, Jr., pp. 361-71. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1973.

In the following essay, Weber considers the development of black humor in American fiction during the 1960s, tracing its beginnings to social and political events from the past, including the French surrealist movement of the 1920s.

The late Edmund Wilson was one of the most influential of American literary critics. Though generally sympathetic to humor and the unconventional in art, in 1954 he bitterly charged that the humorous writings of a virtually unknown nineteenth-century American writer were unadulterated poison. The occasion was the publication of a collection of George Washington Harris's Sut Lovingood sketches in a volume edited by me. Wilson's New Yorker review granted that Harris had “real literary merit.” Nevertheless, it condemned Harris for his allegedly “crude...