Customer Reviews

Fables in Slang (Classics of Modern American Humor Series)

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The first thing you have to tackle with this book is the title, since these stories are not fables and there is little "slang". Ade was not a fantasist. These are very short, realistic, and sometimes very funny stories. He called them fables because they all have a moral, but the moral is ironic, meant to underline the hypocracy and narrow vision of small town mid-west America in the turn of the Century (19th-20th Century). By slang he meant these are stories in the vernacular, written in a conversational tone. Ade was a Drieser in miniature, and one of our best humorists, and his fans included Edmund Wilson and fellow Hoosier Jean Shephard (another underappreciated humorist, remembered for the film The Christmas Story).

Note: I downloaded this free from the Gutenberg Project rather than Amazon, so there may be a few differences between this version and the one I have.

This was written in 1899 and the English has not been updated. Once you get used to the style though, the stories become amusing. They seem more like accounts of people learning life's lessons rather than fables. Some are funny, some are sad and a few I didn't get. As I read them, I realize even though much has changed between 1899 and today, people are much the same. Many of us make the same dumb mistakes as our ancestors did: trusting those we shouldn't, expecting too much or too little, etc. The illustrations are also cool.