This book leads you irreverently and irresponsibly through the pages of American literature. You may even learn something. Richard Armour, that madcap-and-gown satirist, goes his merry way from such Puritan authors as Michael Wigglesworth and Cotton Mather to such not-so-Puritan authors as O'Neill, Hemingway, and Faulkner. Sense and nonsense play a wild game of tag, having a field day in a field often approached to solemnly. The author gives his special kind of literate humor by combining word play, understatement, exaggeration, parody, free association, and irony. The survey course in American literature will never be the same.