Page "belles_lettres" Paragraph 481

One of the early humorists already mentioned, Thomas Bangs Thorpe, can be used to illustrate another point where Faulkner touches authentic Southern materials and also earlier literary treatment of those materials.

Thorpe came to Louisiana from the East as a young man prepared to find in the new country the setting of romantic adventure and idealized beauty.

But Thorpe saw also the hardships of pioneer existence, the cultural poverty of the frontier settlements, and the slack morality which abounded in the new regions.

As a consequence of the tensions thus produced in his thoughts and feelings, he wrote on the one hand sketches of idealized hunting trips and on the other an anecdote of the village of Hardscrabble, Arkansas, where no one had ever seen a piano ; ;

and he wrote also the masterpiece of frontier humor, `` The Big Bear Of Arkansas '', in which earthy realism is placed alongside the exaggeration of the backwoods tall-tale and the awe with which man contemplates the grandeur and the mysteries of nature.