The Complete Works of Bill Nye : (Bill Nye's Comic History Of England, Comic History Of The United States, Cordwood, A Guest At The Ludlow And Other Stories, Nye And Riley's Wit And Humor, Remarks)
(Edgar Wilson "Bill" Nye (August 25, 1850 – February 22, 1...)
Edgar Wilson "Bill" Nye (August 25, 1850 – February 22, 1896) was an American humorist. He was also the founder and editor of the Laramie Boomerang.
The complete works of Bill Nye, including all six books with illustrations, active table of contents, convenient and high-quality Kindle edition.
Book contains:
Bill Nye's Comic History Of England
Comic History Of The United States
Cordwood
A Guest At The Ludlow And Other Stories
Nye And Riley's Wit And Humor
Remarks
Bill Nye's History of the United States. Illustrated by F. Opper.
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Further information on The British Library and its digitisation programme can be found on The British Library website.
Edgar Wilson Nye was an American journalist, humorous writer, and lecturer. His work, like that of all the school, is often disfigured by the haste of its casual production and by its frequent reliance upon the cheap devices of verbal form. But the real merit of it lies in its essential point of view--broad, kindly, and human, and reflecting the new American analysis of traditional and conventional ideas.
Background
Edgar Wilson Nye was born on August 25, 1850 at Shirley, a hamlet of Piscataquis County, Maine, United States. His parents, Franklin and Elizabeth Mitchell (Loring) Nye, were farming people of good New England stock, the father descended from Benjamin Nye who settled at Lynn, Massachussets, in 1635. Poverty prompted their removal to the new West in the migration which poured into Wisconsin after its admission as a state. On the St. Croix River in 1852 they took up, as Bill Nye has recorded, "one hundred and sixty acres of beautiful ferns and bright young rattlesnakes". Edgar's boyhood was spent in the typically American surroundings of a bush farm. The Nyes built themselves a cabin of basswood logs, and a year later, were able to add to it the luxury of a glass window.
Education
Bill Nye himself tells us that he went to school between Indian massacres. Later on his parents were able to send him for a time to an academy at River Falls. His studies, though much broken into by "vacations" during which he worked out by the month, were turned towards the law.
Career
For a time Nye worked in the law office of Bingham & Jenkins in Chippewa Falls, sleeping on the premises at night and keeping his blankets in the office safe. After an interlude of teaching school, in a final effort to achieve admission to the bar he removed to the county seat of Burnett County, which "consisted at that time only of a boarding-house for lumber men, surrounded by the dark-blue billows of a boundless huckleberry patch". Here Bill Nye had his first taste of journalism, conducting for two weeks a newspaper housed in a log hovel.
He left Wisconsin in 1876, drifted westward to Wyoming Territory, and brought up at the new settlement of Laramie City, ever after associated with his name. An informal examination by a "committee of kindly but inquisitive lawyers" admitted him to the bar. But he never practised. His legal status merely served to obtain him the position of justice of the peace. "The office was not a salaried one, " he wrote, "but solely dependent upon fees. So while I was called Judge Nye and frequently mentioned in the papers with great consideration, I was out of coal half the time, and once could not mail my letters for three weeks because I did not have the necessary postage". Neither the bench nor the bar was destined to be his vocation in life.
Soon after his arrival at Laramie and even before he had been elected a justice of the peace, he had done some casual work on a local paper, the Laramie Daily Sentinel. He seems to have acted as reporter and writer of anything and everything at a salary of fifty dollars a month. His connection with the Sentinel brought to him an offer from the San Francisco Chronicle to accompany, as a reporter, General Custer's ill-fated expedition against Sitting Bull (1876). Nye explains with characteristic drollery that a difficulty about getting his trunk checked in time to catch the right train deprived him of the opportunity offered. He varied his work as reporter and justice of the peace by random contributions to other western journals, such as the Cheyenne Daily Sun and the Denver Tribune.
In 1881, with the aid of Judge Jacob Blair, his associate and friend from his first arrival, he started the famous Laramie Boomerang with which his memory has ever since been connected. Nye edited this paper for about three years. His droll comments and obiter dicta--before the days of the "columnist"--and his humorous yarns of frontier life brought the Boomerang a continental reputation, though its editor assures us that he made no money out of it. Many of Nye's "pieces" which were collected to form his books appeared first in the Boomerang. The first collection, Bill Nye and Boomerang (1881), was followed in short order by Forty Liars and Other Lies (1882) and Baled Hay (1884). Meanwhile he had served as postmaster of Laramie from August 1882 until October 1883, when he resigned.
His health had broken, and from time to time for the rest of his life he suffered from meningitis, the disease which eventually caused his death. Advised to seek a lower altitude, he went first to Greeley, Colorado, then back to Wisconsin, buying a farm in Hudson, near the home of his parents. In 1886 he moved East and early in the following year accepted a position on the staff of the New York World, from which time on his name and his writings obtained a national circulation. In 1885 he had appeared in a new and entirely successful rôle as a public lecturer. To vary his entertainment, at first too monotonously funny to be sustained, he united in 1886 with James Whitcomb Riley, thus forming a combination of gravity and gayety whose merit justified its success. For the rest of his life his services were in constant demand on the platform. He appeared with Riley until January 1890, and subsequently with Alfred P. Burbank and with William Hawley Smith. For some time he lectured under the management of James Burton Pond, the famous lyceum organizer. In 1891 he moved his home to Arden, where after repeated periods of ill health he died five years later.
With Riley he wrote Nye and Riley's Railway Guide (1888). He was the author of two plays: The Cadi, based on his experience as postmaster of Laramie, which had moderate success, and The Stag Party, completed under pressure shortly before his last illness, which was a failure.
Achievements
Edgar Wilson Nye's place in American literature belongs among that brilliant and distinctive group of the middle and later nineteenth century, represented chiefly by Mark Twain and Artemus Ward, who first made American humor a distinct and truly national branch of literature.
His most ambitious books were Bill Nye's History of the United States (1894) and Bill Nye's History of England (1896).
