Publisher's Synopsis
Gilbert Seldes considered the newspaper column the most sophisticated of the popular American arts. Often coarse, occasionally eloquent, always opinionated, it is never anything less than inspiring, infuriating and delightful. This fully annotated anthology presents the work of columnists of the calibre of Mark Twain, Will Rogers, Ernie Pyle, Ring Lardner and Art Buchwald. Ranging from Benjamin Franklin, writing as Silence Dogood, castigating the evils of rum, to Anna Quindlen bemoaning being pregnant in New York, and H.L. Mencken lambasting Truman's 1948 presidential campaign as "unhampered by anything resembling a coherent body of ideas", this book offers a vigorous popular history of the USA.
