When Joseph Glover Baldwin published The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi in 1853, he thought of himself as a lawyer. In the memories of subsequent generations, however, the publication of this volume has overshadowed his varied and illustrious legal career and earned for him a rank as the most literarily skilled of the Southwestern humorists. Nearly fifty years after its publication, W. P. Trent, in his Southern Writers: Selections in Prose and Verse (1905), called The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi "the best book of humorous sketches written in the ante-bellum South," and Samuel Link, in Pioneers of Southern Literature (1903), declared: "No man will get all out of life there is for him until he has read ' Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi.'" Although Link's claim is exaggerated, Baldwin's sketches remain accessible and entertaining, as they both illustrate and challenge traditional expectations for the Southwestern genre...