SOURCE: Newlin, Keith. “Georgia Scenes: The Satiric Artistry of Augustus Baldwin Longstreet.” Mississippi Quarterly 41, no. 1 (winter 1987-88): 21-37.

In the following essay, Newlin assesses Augustus Baldwin Longstreet's contribution to Southwestern humor and demonstrates an appreciation for the range of sketches published in Georgia Scenes.

In the preface to Georgia Scenes, Augustus Baldwin Longstreet notes that he has “used some little art in order to recommend [Georgia Scenes] to the readers of my own times.”¹ Yet this collection of sketches has had to wait until the 1980s to receive any real appreciation of its artistry. In the past, most scholars have emphasized Longstreet's contribution to the development of Southwestern humor by discussing only those sketches in Georgia Scenes that are similar to subsequent frontier sketches—principally “Georgia Theatrics,” “The Fight,” “The Gander Pulling,” “The Horse Swap” and “The Character of a Native Georgian”—ignoring or at best only briefly...