The following book review was written for the Mark Twain Forum by Jeffrey Miller. ~~~~~ BOOK REVIEW _Fetching the Old Southwest: Humorous Writing from Longstreet to Twain_. James H. Justus. University of Missouri Press, 2004. Pp. xiii + 591. Hardcover. $54.95. ISBN 0-8262-1544-0. Many books reviewed on the Mark Twain Forum are available at discounted prices from the Twain Web Bookstore. Purchases from this site generate commissions that benefit the Mark Twain Project. Please visit <http://www.twainweb.net> Reviewed for the Mark Twain Forum by: Jeffrey W. Miller Gonzaga University Copyright © 2006 Mark Twain Forum. This review may not be published or redistributed in any medium without permission. _Fetching the Old Southwest_, James H. Justus's ambitious and sprawling examination of newspaper humor from the Old Southwest, provides an excellent overview of the antebellum literary production of a region Justus defines as Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Kentucky, Arkansas, Texas, North Carolina, and Missouri. Justus conceives the book as an attempt to provide a "comprehensive account" of the subject (2), and, checking in at just under six hundred pages, _Fetching_ certainly offers a wealth of information and analysis. It focuses on about twenty humorists, their writings, and the culture which produced them. In fact, Justus claims that the work of the humorists is a "reliable index" of that culture, and a good deal of _Fetching the Old Southwest_ is devoted to delineating exactly how, and to what extent, it serves as such an index. A reader of _Fetching the Old Southwest_ will quickly come to realize that Justus's aims do not serve to create a tightly plotted narrative. Rather, Justus approaches his subject on a grand scale. To a certain extent, this book is a cultural history of the antebellum South, but Justus does not demonstrate the historian's attention to chronology. Instead, he organizes the book around a series of thematic elements: the lost cause, the southern aristocracy, itinerancy and migration, planting and farming, the confidence game, race, hunting, the river, authorship, language, narration, character types. Throughout this varied approach, however, Justus never loses sight of his initial focus. He sees the genre of Southwestern humor as fundamentally democratic, and he returns to this idea regularly throughout the book. _Fetching the Old Southwest_ offers layered complexity beneath a veneer of simplicity. On the face of things, the book is divided into three fairly well defined and appropriately titled sections: Mythmakers and Revisionists, The World the Humorists Found, and The World the Humorists Made. In practice, however, Justus's analysis tends to be recursive. The first two chapters set up themes which are revisited throughout the text: the mythology of the "Old South" and the commonly-held belief that the elite humorists led lives segregated from their "common" subjects. In both cases, Justus argues against the reality of the myth, and these ideas crop up later in the text. His rejection of these myths serves as the opening of his argument for the democracy of Southwestern humor, and later chapters regularly revisit versions of that contention. For example, after laying out the linguistic democracy inherent in the use of the vernacular in the second chapter, Justus returns to the linguistic analysis of the narrative frame in chapter ten, the "Languages of Southwest Humor." Where the second chapter provides analysis of the framed narrative in broad outlines, chapter ten pursues the linguistic shades of the humorists in greater detail, building on the foundation of the earlier discussion. The middle section of the book, "The World the Humorists Found," contains six chapters that carve the "world" into six loosely organized types often utilized in humorous writing: the itinerant, the farmer, the confidence man, the Other, the sportsman, and the river man. His chapter on the figure of the confidence man, "Fetching Arkansas," provides layered possibilities for reading the title of the book: Justus asserts that "fetch" means both "to bring around, to bring off successfully" and "to hoodwink" (148). The third section, "The World the Humorists Made," first looks at the profession (versus the "hobby") of authorship for humorists, then the use of dialect and vernacular, then the notion of oral storytelling versus written narration, then offers a study of types, before launching into a more careful study of three texts. In the final three chapters, Justus turns to extended analyses of William Tappan Thompson's _Major Jones's Courtship_, Johnson Jones Hooper's _Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs_, and George Washington Harris's _Sut Lovingood's Yarns_. These chapters offer the only sustained analysis of individual texts in the book, and in some ways, offer the culmination of what the rest of the book has been setting up. They are the strongest and most focused chapters in the book and offer a fitting end to Justus's sweeping achievement. On the whole, _Fetching the Old Southwest_ is copiously and accurately researched. Justus orchestrates an astounding number of primary documents surrounding the humorous tales, including diaries, correspondence, histories, and travelogues, in order to place the humorists within the broader culture of the era. He also relies on a number of historians of the era in order to frame the historical context. In addition, the book pushes at the margins of the literary canon, making interesting connections between the humorists and better-known authors, such as James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau. For example, in his discussion of river men, he weaves together a comment Thoreau makes in his _A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers_ with Joseph Baldwin's _Keelboat Age_, an 1828 _Geography and History of the Western States_, and the 1855 _Memoir of S. S. Prentiss_ (277-79). Justus writes in a clear, eloquent prose that shifts gears effortlessly, combining history, literary analysis, and journalistic reportage. One complaint: there's not enough Twain, especially given his appearance in the book's subtitle. Readers looking for a comprehensive guide to Twain's use of the humorist tradition in his writings would best look elsewhere, such as Bruce Michelson's _Mark Twain on the Loose_, James Cox's _Mark Twain: the Fate of Humor_, and Kenneth Lynn's _Mark Twain and Southwestern Humor_. However, this is not really a fault of the book; Justus focuses his lens on the generation that gave birth to Twain and Artemus Ward, and they appear only as occasional counterpoint. Despite its comprehensive approach, _Fetching the Old Southwest_ is not really an introduction to the Southwestern humorists. In fact, in its very construction, it assumes a certain level of proficiency with the discourse and its authors. Save for the final three chapters, most of the discussion of any one author is rather fragmented; to be sure, the chapters are thematically coherent, but Justus's frequent shorthand references to his cast of characters might be confusing to a reader not fluent in the discourse. The index, which is detailed and useful, might provide an antidote for a potential reader's confusion. Ultimately, however, such difficulties are worth enduring, as _Fetching the Old Southwest_ is a worthy addition to the criticism of southern literature, and it is essential reading for anyone with an interest in antebellum southern humor.