McHUGH, Hugh (pseud George V. Hobart)

Complete "John Henry" Series in Twelve Volumes: John Henry (1901); Down the Line with John Henry (1901); It's Up To You (1902); Back To the Woods (1902); Out For the Coin (1903); I Need the Money (1903); I'm From Missouri (1904); Get Next (1905); You Can Search Me (1905); Skiddoo (1906); Beat It (1907); Go To It (1908)

New York: G.W. Dillingham Co., 1901-08. First Edition. First printings. Twelve small 12mo volumes (18cm). Uniform tan pictorial cloth, with titles and decorations stamped in black and white; all edges gilt; variously paginated, most volumes ca. 110-125pp + publisher's ads. A uniformly clean and well-preserved set, ranging from Very Good to Fine; a few pages roughly opened; one or two volumes with interior ownership markings or inobtrusive hand-soil to bindings.

Though largely forgotten, George Vere Hobart (1867-1926) was among the most popular and versatile humorists of the first quarter of the 20th century – author of no fewer than twenty novels (most under his pseudonym, "Hugh McHugh"); more than fifty works for the stage including comic operas, stage plays, and musical revues; more than a dozen silent-era movie scripts, and many popular comic songs – all while maintaining a flourishing newspaper career. But what we find most interesting about Hobart, and especially this series of short comic novels built around the exploits of his middle-American everyman "John Henry," is his fantastic ear for American slang. Though far less-known than his literary and temperamental successor Ring Lardner, like Lardner (a decade later) Hobart produced a body of work that must be among the best sources for colloquial American patois of the pre-WW1 era. Of the scant scholarship devoted to Hobart in fact, much of it centers not on his literary contributions but on his linguistic ones – he is credited with, among others, the first recorded use in print of the words "patsy" (in the sense of one easily duped); "plunk" (a slang term for a "dollar"); and "rubberneck" (one who cranes their neck to eavesdrop). All of these examples are taken from the current series of novels, whose protagonist "John Henry" has been described by one scholar as an "...average American who, using the popular and slang-encrusted idiom of his time, described a wide range of everyday occurrences and social events, leaving no doubt about his aversion ot the pretentiousness and the superficiality of the world in which he lived" (Holger Kersten, "Nonsense, Satire, and Language Art: George V. Hobart's German-American Dialect Writing" in Thalia: Studies in Literary Humor v.19 1-2, 1999). In this conscious deployment of non-literary, non "upper-class" idioms – especially against the exaggerated "swell" depiction of the main character that decorates the books' covers – we see the establishment of a new, quintessentially 20th-century American type: the wise-guy – smart as a whip, able to see through it all, but unburdened by the trappings of caste or class. It's a character who reappears regularly through the third quarter of the century; we can hear echoes of Hobart's style in writers as diverse as Ring Lardner, Damon Runyon, Raymond Chandler, even Joseph Heller and Ken Kesey. We won't suggest that Hobart carved out this territory all by himself, but he is certainly among its great early explorers – and deserving, we think, of more attention than he's received. A fetching little set of books; odd volumes proliferate on-line (as might be expected of work by a once uber-popular but no longer collected author), but assembling the entire series was a matter of some time and effort. See: SMITH (American Fiction 1901-1925) H-685-702.

Price: $650.00

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