SOURCE: "Estimates of the Dead," in Seven Years' Harvest: Notes on Contemporary Literature, Farrar & Rinehart, 1936, pp. 49-53.

In the following essay, Canby discusses Rogers in the context of other "homespun philosophers."

Will Rogers was a fellow of infinite jest, a true Shakespearian clown, who used clowning to savor his philosophy. Yet it was not what he said, or did, but what he stood for in the American scene that seems most interesting.

We Americans have had a long tradition of philosophers in homespun, so long considering the little age of the Republic, and so notable in their day and sometimes after it, as to ask for comment. Homespun in mind they have all been, which means, that whatever the source of their wisdom, its form and pressure were distinctively local to this continent, and many of them have been homely also in speech, self-made in knowledge, and blatantly...