SOURCE: Royot, Daniel. “Sam Slick and American Popular Humour.” In The Thomas Chandler Haliburton Symposium, edited by Frank M. Tierney, pp. 123-33. Ottawa, Ont.: University of Ottawa Press, 1985.

In the following essay, Royot discusses how Haliburton borrowed ideas from various frontier humorists to create Sam Slick and how Haliburton's writings influenced later American humorists.

A retrospective view of the Clockmaker series makes it clear that Haliburton deliberately established a link between various brands of the American comic spirit. Resulting from his gleanings of folk humour, his achievements were ultimately conducive to a new genre combining oral tradition, popular culture, and literature, as later exemplified in Mark Twain's works. In this respect, the figure of Sam Slick amounts to a palimpsest which seems worth scrutinizing. Through Haliburton's persona New England and Southwestern lore is transmuted and given a fresh perspective. Such hybridization, misleading though it might appear in the...