SOURCE: An introduction to Selected Short Stories of William Dean Howells, edited by Ruth Bardon, Ohio University Press, 1997, pp. xiii-xxvii.

It is impossible to say just when the bemused householder and white-collar man became really prominent in American humor, but by 1910 Stephen Leacock, Simeon Strunsky, and Clarence Day, Jr. were writing pieces in which the disguise of each author was just that. As noted before, one of Benchley's direct models was Leacock, whose Literary Lapses appeared in that year. "Leacock to quote Ralph L. Curry found much of his fun in the little man beset by advertising, fads, convention, sex, science, cussedness, machinery—social and industrial—and many other impersonal tyrannies." Benchley's favorite piece of humor was "My Financial Career," in Literary Lapses, where a bedeviled Little Man of the lower middle class is overawed and confused by a bank and its officials. Robert once stated, "I have...