ABSTRACT
STORYTELLING Traditional storytelling takes place wherever small groups gather to work or socialize. In rural and small-town America, such settings traditionally have included general stores (with the inevitable “liars bench” out front), fishing boats, hunting camps, barbershops, and home porches or firesides. In modern America, jokes are shared around the office water cooler and after work at bars; scary stories are told at spend-the-night parties and around the campfire on scouting trips and at summer camp; and urban legends circulate in beauty parlors, shopping malls, school cafeterias, and college fraternity and sorority suites.
