STYX TRYX THE HUMOROUS FANTASIES OF JOHN KENDRICK BANGS (1983) with Mary A. Burgess The humorous ghost story is a peculiarly American subgenre, spawned in the tall tales told around a roaring campfire and first developed into a literary form by Washington Irving. Irving’s stories, epitomized by “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” became immensely popular—more popular with the hoi polloi, it is true, than with the critics, who have always regarded Irving as somewhat less than a serious writer. After Irving, occasional writers attempted to produce humorous fantasy, often with rather haphazard results. By the late Victorian period, however, the “serious” ghost story, both in England and in America, had reached one of its periodic peaks of popularity, with both countries’ best writers producing classic examples. Robert Louis Stevenson, Charles Dickens, Henry James—these are but a few of the major serious authors who popularized this literary form. As a counterpoint to this movement, other writers began turning to the humorous ghost story, both to profit by these fast-selling stories and to satirize them.
