Historically, Thurber follows the traditional horse-sense humorists, and he is clearly related to the nineteenthand early twentieth-century journalistic humorists and literary comedians such as Mark Twain, George H. Derby (who wrote "A New System of English Grammar"), Robert Henry Newell, Charles Farrar Browne, David Ross Locke, Henry W. Shaw, Charles H. Smith, Edgar Wilson Nye, George Ade (the author of a series of Fables in Slang), Finley Peter Dunne, Ambrose Bierce, and Ring Lardner, among others, who commented from an objective point of view on the contemporary world that surrounded them and in a very specific format. Thurber's Little Man character draws from Benchley, and perhaps later from S. J. Perelman a bit, but he is at the beginning of a tradition, and ultimately his refinements make the character uniquely and identifiably his own creation.