Most every scholar of figurative language will find something of value in Don Nilsen's Humor in American Literature: A Selected Annotated Bibliography. Nilsen's bibliography is a comprehensive set of summaries of books, articles, and other reviews written about humor in American literature. The main section - a collection of scholarly analyses of humorists' works arranged chronologically by humorist - consists of over 1,000 entries, cogently and evocatively written. The seeds of numerous theses and articles are scattered throughout the pages. The chronology begins with the early settlers in the 17th century and continues to the present, analyzing a wide variety of humorists-those who mark a century, such as Ben Franklin, Mark Twain, and Will Rogers and those less influential. (Robert Kraft)