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Fables in Slang
Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.
204 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1899
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127 people want to read
About the author
George Ade
190 books16 followersGeorge Ade (February 9, 1866 – May 16, 1944) was an American writer, newspaper columnist, and playwright.
Ade's literary reputation rests upon his achievements as a great humorist of American character during an important era in American history: the first large wave of migration from the countryside to burgeoning cities like Chicago, where, in fact, Ade produced his best fiction. He was a practicing realist during the Age of (William Dean) Howells and a local colorist of Chicago and the Midwest. His work constitutes a vast comedy of Midwestern manners and, indeed, a comedy of late 19th-century American manners. In 1915, Sir Walter Raleigh, Oxford professor and man of letters, while on a lecture tour in America, called George Ade "the greatest living American writer."
(wikipedia)
Ade's literary reputation rests upon his achievements as a great humorist of American character during an important era in American history: the first large wave of migration from the countryside to burgeoning cities like Chicago, where, in fact, Ade produced his best fiction. He was a practicing realist during the Age of (William Dean) Howells and a local colorist of Chicago and the Midwest. His work constitutes a vast comedy of Midwestern manners and, indeed, a comedy of late 19th-century American manners. In 1915, Sir Walter Raleigh, Oxford professor and man of letters, while on a lecture tour in America, called George Ade "the greatest living American writer."
(wikipedia)
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
February 15, 2019
No one reads the old humorists anymore. And why should they, with so many stories of sexy werewolves and other rabies-carrying Lotharios around? Obviously there's just no competing with that.
I'm probably the only person born after 1960 who still seems to care about the musings of Robert Benchley or H. Allen Smith or Fred Allen or H.L. Mencken or S.J. Perelman or Oscar Levant or Damon Runyon or Ogden Nash or Ring Lardner Sr. or this guy, George Ade, who predated all of them in the pantheon of notable early 20th-century humorists.
I first became acquainted with Ade about five years ago when I came across his story, "The Barclay Lawn Party,” which is something of a compact classic (all of Ade’s stories are compressed and fast—barely more than a dozen graphs each; the man knows no padding). Like most Ade stories, it is over before it seems to have begun, and certainly other writers may have expanded on his ideas and mined them for greater possibilities, but Ade was a kind of hit-and-run storyteller, he barely takes his seedlings past the stage where their fledgling stems break the earth; he expresses his idea, makes his points quickly with little elaboration and moves on to the next tale.
“The Barclay Lawn Party” (from a different book, In Babel: Stories of Chicago) is quintessential Ade and his main target as is often the case seems to be the stupidity of Americans. He has far less faith in the salt of the earth than Damon Runyon does but he is less hard on them than H.L. Mencken. Usually it’s the elites—or those who fancy themselves to be--that come in for a drubbing; Ade is far less elitist than Mencken. The story revolves around a lawn party held by the middle-class Barclay family in a once-idyllic suburban neighborhood of Chicago that is quickly being overrun by urban industrialization and blight. It is clear that internecine strife exists in the family over this fact: the wife and daughters want to flee this lowly blue-collar milieu for greener pastures but the man of the house insists on staying put. The lawn party is an attempt by the family to inject its own sense of proper civilized decorum into this setting, and of course it is all undercut as the working class denizens of the hood begin to gather like crows at the fence separating the Barclay lawn from the unruly street. Conflict arises over this, the Barclays not only wanting privacy from the prying eyes of the hoi polloi but desiring to maintain their own illusion of elite exclusivity. The hood denizens, indignant at being shooed away since they are occupying a public street to which they have a right, begin to clash with a policeman when being told to move away. In an abrupt ending to the story, a common occurrence in Ade, the women of the house flee as they had always wanted.
The story in short order tackles class conflict and elitist pretenses, the growth of the industrial blue-collar class, “white flight” to suburbia, differing interpretations of laws and rights between citizens and cops, police brutality, and interfamily relations, and does so with a kind of gentle, wry humor.
Many of the stories in Fables in Slang touch on similar themes and issues—the usual types are splashed with Ade's mild acid: lawyers, politicians, the gullible masses, the self-righteous--all cast in the mode of Aesop with a stated “moral” at the end, and the stories are told in the American common argot of 1899 when the book was written, though in some cases the so-called slang has become so part of the language today that its classification as slang might be hard to discern to the contemporary ear. By the same token, some of the meanings of the phrases and slang of that time period are now hard to decipher, having passed from common usage long ago.
I’m not sure I understand Ade’s excessive use of capitalization for virtually all nouns in the book. At first I thought he might be highlighting slang words by that device, but it doesn’t seem to be the case.
The book is light as a feather and probably forgettable, but after a spell Ade’s style grows on one.
This book was actually the rage of 1899 and spawned a series of "Fables" books by Ade for the next two decades, as well as compilations into the 1940s after which his literary cache seemed to have plummeted.
It hardly goes without saying that passages like the following show that little has changed in the 112 years since this book's publication: "Once an investigative committee got after him and he was about to be shown up for dallying with Corporations, but he put on a fresh White Tie and made a Speech about our Heroic Dead on a Hundred Battle-Fields, and Most People said it was simply Impossible for such a Thunderous Patriot to be a Crook."
---
kr, eg, reposted with some additions and minor corrections in 2019
I'm probably the only person born after 1960 who still seems to care about the musings of Robert Benchley or H. Allen Smith or Fred Allen or H.L. Mencken or S.J. Perelman or Oscar Levant or Damon Runyon or Ogden Nash or Ring Lardner Sr. or this guy, George Ade, who predated all of them in the pantheon of notable early 20th-century humorists.
I first became acquainted with Ade about five years ago when I came across his story, "The Barclay Lawn Party,” which is something of a compact classic (all of Ade’s stories are compressed and fast—barely more than a dozen graphs each; the man knows no padding). Like most Ade stories, it is over before it seems to have begun, and certainly other writers may have expanded on his ideas and mined them for greater possibilities, but Ade was a kind of hit-and-run storyteller, he barely takes his seedlings past the stage where their fledgling stems break the earth; he expresses his idea, makes his points quickly with little elaboration and moves on to the next tale.
“The Barclay Lawn Party” (from a different book, In Babel: Stories of Chicago) is quintessential Ade and his main target as is often the case seems to be the stupidity of Americans. He has far less faith in the salt of the earth than Damon Runyon does but he is less hard on them than H.L. Mencken. Usually it’s the elites—or those who fancy themselves to be--that come in for a drubbing; Ade is far less elitist than Mencken. The story revolves around a lawn party held by the middle-class Barclay family in a once-idyllic suburban neighborhood of Chicago that is quickly being overrun by urban industrialization and blight. It is clear that internecine strife exists in the family over this fact: the wife and daughters want to flee this lowly blue-collar milieu for greener pastures but the man of the house insists on staying put. The lawn party is an attempt by the family to inject its own sense of proper civilized decorum into this setting, and of course it is all undercut as the working class denizens of the hood begin to gather like crows at the fence separating the Barclay lawn from the unruly street. Conflict arises over this, the Barclays not only wanting privacy from the prying eyes of the hoi polloi but desiring to maintain their own illusion of elite exclusivity. The hood denizens, indignant at being shooed away since they are occupying a public street to which they have a right, begin to clash with a policeman when being told to move away. In an abrupt ending to the story, a common occurrence in Ade, the women of the house flee as they had always wanted.
The story in short order tackles class conflict and elitist pretenses, the growth of the industrial blue-collar class, “white flight” to suburbia, differing interpretations of laws and rights between citizens and cops, police brutality, and interfamily relations, and does so with a kind of gentle, wry humor.
Many of the stories in Fables in Slang touch on similar themes and issues—the usual types are splashed with Ade's mild acid: lawyers, politicians, the gullible masses, the self-righteous--all cast in the mode of Aesop with a stated “moral” at the end, and the stories are told in the American common argot of 1899 when the book was written, though in some cases the so-called slang has become so part of the language today that its classification as slang might be hard to discern to the contemporary ear. By the same token, some of the meanings of the phrases and slang of that time period are now hard to decipher, having passed from common usage long ago.
I’m not sure I understand Ade’s excessive use of capitalization for virtually all nouns in the book. At first I thought he might be highlighting slang words by that device, but it doesn’t seem to be the case.
The book is light as a feather and probably forgettable, but after a spell Ade’s style grows on one.
This book was actually the rage of 1899 and spawned a series of "Fables" books by Ade for the next two decades, as well as compilations into the 1940s after which his literary cache seemed to have plummeted.
It hardly goes without saying that passages like the following show that little has changed in the 112 years since this book's publication: "Once an investigative committee got after him and he was about to be shown up for dallying with Corporations, but he put on a fresh White Tie and made a Speech about our Heroic Dead on a Hundred Battle-Fields, and Most People said it was simply Impossible for such a Thunderous Patriot to be a Crook."
---
kr, eg, reposted with some additions and minor corrections in 2019
didn-t-finish
June 21, 2020Apparently this was quite popular 100 years ago. I does nothing for me now. Short, supposedly funny, stories many contrasting city folk and country folk, told in American vernacular English, with tongue-in-check morals attached at the end. Like Mark Twain but not half as entertaining.
(The Westvaco 1972 Christmas edition I found is a physically lovely. Wish they'd picked a different text for such lovely treatment.)
(The Westvaco 1972 Christmas edition I found is a physically lovely. Wish they'd picked a different text for such lovely treatment.)
September 26, 2015
Amusing, but I doubt I'll remember much of this six months from now. And I've decided that Ade's fable pieces are much better heard on Ron Evry's podcast, Mr. Ron's Basement, than read in print.
Read
January 20, 2025I love reading old humorists. While they're often bland (or bigoted, which is similar), there are usually some broad passages that are eyerollingly funny-that-this-was-ever-funny primitive, which I can savor as I mentally apply Bob Hope's cadence to the narration.
There's also a slim chance you might actually pick up some adaptable barb-that-was-old-before-you-were-born-but-still-holds-up-in-limited-contexts which you can add to your repertoire. I'm still always mystified by old-timey P.L. Travers-esque Indiscrimate Capitalization.
There's also a slim chance you might actually pick up some adaptable barb-that-was-old-before-you-were-born-but-still-holds-up-in-limited-contexts which you can add to your repertoire. I'm still always mystified by old-timey P.L. Travers-esque Indiscrimate Capitalization.
May 20, 2020
These stories are collected from Ade's newspaper columns. They are short, funny, perceptive. A delightful read and an interesting look at America at the beginning of the 20th Century. In terms of prejudice, class, and injustice generally, it's fascinating to see what's changed and what hasn't.
September 29, 2020
I read this for period slang research, which was very helpful, but it turned out the book was hilarious too. Definitely a good time.
January 16, 2009
My copy is an old hardcover, original 1906. It's very good light reading in the vein of Aesop.
October 22, 2011
I finally feel like a proper Kentland/Brook girl to have read some Ade. The stories were amusing. I got the small town feel, but I'll admit I was looking for more traces of home than I found.
February 4, 2013
Bizarre and hilarious.
November 20, 2014
Seemed like a caricature of slang, not what real people might say... Although each one had a moral, it was usually not connected to the story. I didn't think it was very funny...
November 22, 2014
Very enjoyable, if dated.
April 30, 2017
This amusing volume was brought to my attention by that wonderful work -- Noel Perrin's A Reader's Delight -- which has led me to many previous happy rediscoveries. If you're a serious reader, I'd strongly suggest rounding up a copy of Perrin.
George Ade was a newspaper humorist, deliberately following in the footsteps of Mark Twain, and based in Chicago all his life. His focus was everyday life, and the tribulations and sillinesses of the common man. He also wrote comedic/satiric plays.
One of the devices he used in his newspaper column was to tell a modern fable (of which this book is a collection), with a moral at the end, loaded with slang phrases and humorously capitalized words. They bear such titles as "The Fable of the Slim Girl Who Tried to Keep a Date that was Never Made" "The Fable of the Base Ball Fan Who Took the Only Known Cure" and "The Fable of the Parents Who Tinkered with the Offspring." You can get the whole tone of the work from one title, I think: "The Fable of the Caddy Who Hurt His Head while Thinking"
The morals are not what one is normally used to in that line: Moral: Give the People what they Think they want. Moral: A Dramatic Editor should never go to a Burgoo Picnic--especially in Kentucky. Moral: Some Women should be given the Right to Vote. [This was published in 1899.] Moral: Anybody can Win unless there happens to be a Second Entry.
Each fable is fairly short, and I'll certainly be reading a couple of them at our next Passage Party. But which?????
Yes, I found these thoroughly amusing, frequently wise, and persistently wicked. Yes, I will now begin quietly collecting more of Ade's works. Yes, Noel Perrin strikes again.
One thing I should note is that for all the fancy and phony and slangy language in this book, it is nonetheless a zero-grimace oeuvre.
George Ade was a newspaper humorist, deliberately following in the footsteps of Mark Twain, and based in Chicago all his life. His focus was everyday life, and the tribulations and sillinesses of the common man. He also wrote comedic/satiric plays.
One of the devices he used in his newspaper column was to tell a modern fable (of which this book is a collection), with a moral at the end, loaded with slang phrases and humorously capitalized words. They bear such titles as "The Fable of the Slim Girl Who Tried to Keep a Date that was Never Made" "The Fable of the Base Ball Fan Who Took the Only Known Cure" and "The Fable of the Parents Who Tinkered with the Offspring." You can get the whole tone of the work from one title, I think: "The Fable of the Caddy Who Hurt His Head while Thinking"
The morals are not what one is normally used to in that line: Moral: Give the People what they Think they want. Moral: A Dramatic Editor should never go to a Burgoo Picnic--especially in Kentucky. Moral: Some Women should be given the Right to Vote. [This was published in 1899.] Moral: Anybody can Win unless there happens to be a Second Entry.
Each fable is fairly short, and I'll certainly be reading a couple of them at our next Passage Party. But which?????
Yes, I found these thoroughly amusing, frequently wise, and persistently wicked. Yes, I will now begin quietly collecting more of Ade's works. Yes, Noel Perrin strikes again.
One thing I should note is that for all the fancy and phony and slangy language in this book, it is nonetheless a zero-grimace oeuvre.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews