DELVING down into a close printed jumble of old inaccessible almanacs, Richard M. Dorson '37 has selected and edited in an extremely readable way the best of the Davy Crockett stories. That fantastic legendary figure, a combination of an epic hero and a coarse, earthy frontier representation of Baron Munchausen, is more than just an early example of American humor at its broadest and most extravagant. The Crockett Almanacs, with their crazy exaggerations and crudities and all their local color, have real literary value and show the frontier spirit at its best and worst.

Without any question, all matters of culture and mythology aside, these ancedotes make wonderful reading. The stories are bulging with humor, the dialect is fast moving and expressive, and the tall tales are fantastic and original. It has been held by some reviewers that the Almanacs, with all their humor, have not the literary quality ascribed to them by Howard M. Jones in his foreword to the book. Although the "lyric exuberance" of these stories might be doubted, what does seem undeniably present in these anecdotes is an outstanding amount of imagination and originality in the language and the situations.

Take the description of Crockett when he "grated thunder with his teeth," or the woman who used to "brag that she war a streak of litenin set up edgeways and buttered with quicksilver," or the cold morning when "the airth had actually friz fast in her axis, and couldn't turn around; the sun had got jammed between two cakes of ice under the wheels, an' thar he had been shinin and working to get loose, till he friz fast in his cold sweat." This work is no mere potboiler.

In an illuminating introduction, Mr. Dorson makes a general discussion of "Frontier Humor and Legend." He treats with the exaggeration, verbal imagery, and other conventions of this frontier humor. Most significantly of all, he mentions the "unmistakable sameness to the varied versions of the American tall tale--It is the frontiersman's fun, his escape, his opportunity to create." The Crockett Almanacs are the true expression of the frontier; as such Mr. Dorson has done a valuable service in making this material accessible.