Writers of good humorous verse are always to be valued and so it is no surprise that Samuel Hoffenstein's work is still admired by a small but growing group of readers who look back on the period of the 1920s and 1930s as one of the great periods of that genre. The preeminent author of the type was Dorothy Parker, although Edna St. Vincent Millay produced some good if exceedingly cynical examples and Ogden Nash turned out some wonderfully ingenious pieces. But few could beat Hoffenstein at turning an apt phrase, delivering a choice pun, parodying his contemporaries, or puncturing the pretensions of the age. Indeed, Poems in Praise of Practically Nothing (1928) is a minor classic of American humor.

Born in Lithuania, Samuel Goodman Hoffenstein was brought to this country at the age of four. His parents, Josiah Mayer and Taube Gita Kahn Hoffenstein, settled in Pennsylvania, where...