I found 0. Henry when I was young, with “Cabbages and Kings”, later, I read the famous short stories, and formed the opinion that he was a short story writer who had tried his hand at “a novel”, but was limited in his ability. Still later, I realized that “Cabages and Kings” came before his well-known short stories, which came before his later short stores – he started strong, then worked for a living.
Now I’ve found his early newspaper work, which demonstrates that he started out as a newspaper humorist, who thought he had a novel in him.
And in among the newspaper humour, an obit for Bill Nye. And with justice: I see that 0’Henry was strongly influenced by Bill Nye, given that Nye was publishing just at the right time to influence William Porter (O. Henry). And then Nye is an intermediate in a genre that stretches back to “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” – that is a long-form short story, but before that Clemens was writing newspaper homour.
This also gives me a context for “The Judges Shirt”, which has been mentioned on this board before.
I’ve never thought of this as an “American Genre” before, but I’ve read English humour from the same period, and it doesn’t exactly match.
I can see where Saki and O.Henry end up at approximately the same place, and approximately the same time, although the characters they write are very different.
But I don’t think that Saki is ever really anything like “The Celebrated Frog” or “The Judges Shirt”. It’s Bill Nye that I think is the centre of a uniquely American genre. Porter started there, which is how I found Nye, and Clemmens started there, which was a development of even earlier American humour.
I think that American literature converged with British literature, but I think there was (what now appears to be) a broad river of 1800’s American humour that was distinctly American (not like Punch, or Vanity Fair)