ABSTRACT
A colleague and perhaps a mentor of Mark Twain, Dan De Quille was a past master of the art of the literary hoax, that deadpan brand of humor that tricks unwary readers into believing a story that is fundamentally implausible but becomes progressively credible. De Quille thus is part of an American tradition that began with the tall tales of the frontier storytellers and was elevated to high art by Mark Twain. Even after Goodman and most of his distinguished colleagues left the paper and De Quille himself began to freelance for the Salt Lake City Tribune and a score of other periodicals across the country, De Quille remained with the Enterprise as its most important writer until it suspended publication in 1893, thirteen years after the Comstock region began its sharp decline in profitability and population. Dan De Quille earned several separate but overlapping reputations during his lifetime of writing.
