ABSTRACT
The literary comedians were professional literary men, and they sought financial success as writers as well as literary recognition. The literary comedians of the Civil War era—Artemus Ward, Petroleum V. Nasby, and Orpheus C. Kerr—were the authors who defined the movement for later readers, however, and with whom Mark Twain was in most immediate contact in the formative years of his career. The comic journalists of the Civil War, each in their own idiosyncratic manner, brought the nascent middle class ethics of the Shillaber-Phoenix pose to bear on the national experience as understood by the North and West. Both Abraham Lincoln and the literary comedians represented the new forces at work, declaring the rise of the democratic middle-class citizen to a position of social responsibility. The literary comedians espoused the same values in their humor that Lincoln expressed in politics.
