Charles Farrar Browne dominated American humor during the Civil War era. For a time he served as managing editor of the New York humor magazine Vanity Fair, and his comic lectures, delivered with a poker-faced earnestness which anticipated and probably influenced Mark Twain's platform style, delighted audiences from San Francisco to London. But Browne's major contribution to American humor was his series of Artemus Ward letters. These letters, purportedly written by a garrulous circus showman called Artemus Ward who roamed far and wide and commented on the foibles of his time, helped to raise American comic journalism to the status of an authentic art form. As author of the Artemus Ward letters, Browne became the most famous--and arguably the most deft--of a generation of American literary comedians whose number included George Horatio Derby and Melville D. Landon. Along with others in this group, Browne integrated the techniques of...