SOURCE: "Abe Martin and Will Rogers," in Horse Sense in American Humor: From Benjamin Franklin to Ogden Nash, The University of Chicago Press, 1942, pp. 256-73.

In the following essay, Blair surveys early humorists who influenced Rogers.

I

Plenty of people in 1930 were ready to swear that, in Kin Hubbard and Will Rogers, the twentieth century had produced two figures the like of which America had not seen in the past. But anyone who looks back through the years at the scores of homespun philosophers who said things as Americans liked to have them said will see that the resemblances between these writers of our own day and the men who went before them are much more important than the differences—that a good old pattern in humor is often better than a new one and the popular literary memory is short.

Kin Hubbard, born in Bellefontaine, Ohio, in...