Agent-Centered Morality

Better known to his readers as "Sut Lovingood," Harris was a successful river pilot on the Tennessee River when he published his first sketch in The Spirit of the Times, an immensely popular New York magazine that featured in its pages some of the best tall tales and humor of the Old Southwest. As M. Thomas Inge observed, "he quickly developed a facility for local color and dialect and a skill for bringing backwoods scenes and events to life on the printed page."

Though considered by many as coarse and even cruel, Harris has had many admirers among his mostly male readers, one of whom was young Mark Twain, who regarded him as one of the best of a large number of humorists who wrote in the antebellum South---an estimation that has had some distinguished collaboration during the twentieth century. William Faulkner said that Sut Lovingood was one of his favorite characters in literature: "He had no illusions about himself, did the best he could; at certain times he was a coward and knew it and wasn't ashamed; he never blamed his misfortunes on anyone and never cursed God for them." For F. O. Matthiessen, it was Harris's style that distinguished him from other vernacular humorists---at least before Twain---because he brought "us closer than any other writer to the indigenous and undiluted resources of the American language." Shortly before his death, Harris collected many of his tales and sketches in Sut Lovingood: Yarns Spun by a "Nat'ral Born Durn'd Fool"(1867).

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