Captian John Smith (American Tall-tale & Humor)

[Terrance]

Smith wrote many accounts of his experience in Virginia and New
 England, including The General Historie of Virginia, New England,
 and the Summer Isles. In these works, especially in his account of
 fighting off 200 Native Americans while using one as a shield, Smith
 provided early examples of the tall tale. Furthermore, his discussions
 of  leadership and survival in the Virginia wilderness make him one of
the
 first American writers to explore the themes of self-creation,
 practicality, industry, self-reliance, and cultural contact. In many
 ways, he is a precursor to Benjamin Franklin, Ralph Waldo Emerson,
 Walt Whitman, and Mark Twain.

And Melville and  Irving, Poe, Thorpe, truly the estate Pynchon
inherits.  For American humor is a  vehicle of Deep Diving (using
Melville's term here) and Insight. Humor must be imaginative because it
is also a mode of transcendence. The frontier, the hunt for whales,
where a particular American humor grew out of the Westward Expansion's
oral tradition, where heroes and voices took on a unique American sense
and manner--all share an American impulse to transcend the self, to sing
beyond the sea, to rise above mere comic attack, ridicule, put down,
satire. 


http://www.compedit.com/haslam.htm

Smith’s relaxed and pragmatic attitude towards the "truth of these
accidents"
    anticipates literary con men like Simon Suggs and various heroes of
both
    American folk and fake lore. There is a touch of wit, at least, in
Smith’s honest
    admission that he is a good liar.




http://www.compedit.com/colonial_almanacs.htm

Although rather early in its development, the American colonial almanac
began
    to fulfill, tolerably after its fashion, the neoclassical precept
for literature—to
    instruct and to delight, the first generation of almanac-makers
leaned much
    more toward instruction than delectation. Seriously utilitarian and
scientific, the
    Harvard Philomaths (1639-1692) produced almanacs whose information
was
    primarily astronomical, navigational, and calendrical. Not until the
almanac had
    become a customary form in colonial New England do we encounter the
first
    example of its humor. This humor, playing on the almanac’s form,
relied on
    New England colonial prejudice.

    John Richardson in his 1670 almanac describes the heavenly bodies
and
    prognosticates in "The Country-mans Apocrapha":

http://www.compedit.com/clark.htm

The most humorous historians of slavery in America, paradoxically, have
been
    some fugitives whose slave narratives were published during the
Abolition
    Crusade as propaganda.





http://www.compedit.com/weixlmn.htm

Truth, in any absolute sense, is not a primary issue, for in Barth’s own
words,
    "a novelist, like a Soviet historian, regards truth as just more or
less relevant
    raw material and manipulates it always with ulterior motive."8 The
Sot-Weed
    Factor does not contain an authorial attempt to depict life in
Colonial America
    directly or realistically. According to Barth, his fiction embodies
"a
    representation of a distortion; not a representation of life itself,
but a
    representation of





http://www.compedit.com/toc.htm