The Tall Tale in American Folklore and Literature

To Carolyn Brown s mind, the tall tale is not necessarily an account of the adventures of a larger-than-life hero, nor is it just a humorous first-person narrative exaggerated to outlandish proportions. It is as well an interaction between teller and audience a game played at the hazy border between the credible and the incredible, a challenge and an entertainment at the same time. The tall tale is also a social statement that identifies and binds a folk group by flaunting the peculiar knowledge and experiences of group members, and it is a tool for coping with a stressful or even chaotic world, for conquering life s problems by laughing at them.

Drawing on previous research and her own original fieldwork, the author develops in detail this definition of the tall tale as a genre of folklore, and she then explores how tall tale methods and meanings have been translated into literary humor. She probes the ways that writers have used this genre to create a complex rhetorical relationship among text, author, narrator, and reader. The book moves from the Crockett Almanacs, sketches, newspaper hoaxes, and frontier frame tales to present entirely new readings of such standard nineteenth-century works as Augustus Baldwin Longstreet s Georgia Scenes, George Washington Harris s Sut Lovingood, and Mark Twain s Autobiography. Finally, Brown alludes to the echoes of tall tale attitudes and style still found in modern written humor.