Dog and Gun: A Few Loose Chapters on Shooting, Among Which Will Be Found Some Anecdotes and Incidents (Library Alabama Classics)
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The least well known of Johnson Jones Hooper’s works, D...)
The least well known of Johnson Jones Hooper’s works, Dog and Gun was first published as a newspaper series, then appeared in six book editions between 1856 and 1871. Hooper is Alabama’s most celebrated antebellum author, and here he gives insight into the meaning of a culture where every male hunts – and a man who shoots as a gentleman will be assumed a gentleman. Beidler’s introduction to this reprint edition explores the social, literary, and technical dimensions of Dog and Gun, which he sees as an important commentary on class distinctions in the antebellum South, as well as a straightforward treatise on hunting.
Although the book is a manual for the hunter, with characteristic humor and a certain disdain, Hooper gives a full picture of the gentlemanly sport of hunting – clearly distinct from hunting for food – in all aspects including hunter, weaponry, and sporting dogs. He takes us back to an autumnal ritual of the hunt, where one is always a boy with his first gun – to the natural mystery of quest, competition, predation, pursuit, survival, bravery, endurance, and eventual defeat, called the mystery of the hunt.
Some Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs, Late of the Tallapoosa Volunteers
(Johnson Jones Hooper was born in Wilmington, North Caroli...)
Johnson Jones Hooper was born in Wilmington, North Carolina as the youngest of three sons of Archibald Maclaine Hooper and Charlotte de Bernier Hooper. He moved to Dadeville, Alabama in 1835 where he edited a newspaper and practiced law. All told, he founded or edited six different publications during his career. His first published work, in 1843, was "Taking the Census in Alabama", drawn from his own experiences as a census taker in Tallapoosa County. In 1844 he began publishing short stories about the rascally Simon Suggs, which he collected and published in 1845 as the Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs; broadly, cruelly, and uncouthly humorous, yet one of the raciest books of its time, descriptive of a gambling sharp of the Southwest in the "flush times." The work made him nationally known, and may have inspired one or more characters of Mark Twain's.
Johnson Jones Hooper was an American politician, editor and writer. He was active in Whig politics, editor of political journals, and author of Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs.
Background
Johnson Jones Hooper was born on June 9, 1815 in Wilmington, North Carolina, United States. His father, Archibald Maclaine Hooper, a journalist, was related to the most prominent families in North Carolina, and his mother, Charlotte de Berniere, the daughter of a British army officer, was descended from Jeremy Taylor. George, the oldest son in the family, attended West Point but withdrew to read law; Maclaine died in childhood; and John, the third son, became a professor of classics at The University of North Carolina.
Education
Hooper attended public school in Wilmington, read widely and voraciously, and was taught by his father. He did not go to college, but at fifteen he was in Charleston, the home of his mother's relatives, working on a newspaper.
Career
At twenty Hooper set out on a journey of the Gulf states, living by his wits, a few months here and a few there, until 1840, when he settled in Lafayette, Alabama, and read law under his brother, already a resident of seven years' standing. But the wanderlust and the newspaper instinct had firm hold of him and he was obliged to be stirring.
Hooper's political and editorial career was a busy one. He edited the East Alabamian (1844), the Wetumpka Whig (1845) the Alabama Journal (1846) and the Chambers County Tribune (1849-1854). For a time he edited the Dadeville Banner, attracting attention to it by his humor, and then he moved on to edit the Wetumpka Whig for six months. This was in 1846. Later in the same year, at Montgomery, he helped edit the Journal, and then he returned to Lafayette. In the meantime, the chronicle of that arch backwoods sharper, Simon Suggs, whom he had invented for his journals, had become widely popular; some of it had been reprinted in the New York Spirit of the Times, and in 1846 a great portion of it, Some Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs, Late of the Tallapoosa Volunteers, was published in book form in Philadelphia.
A. B. Longstreet and W. T. Thompson had preceded Hooper in portraying the type man of the early Southern frontier, and J. G. Baldwin a little later was to do the same with greater artistry. Yet, Hooper unified his stories more thoroughly than had been customary with his predecessors. In 1851 he published The Widow Rugby's Husband, A Night at the Ugly Man's and Other Tales of Alabama, which was similar to the Suggs stories in its subject matter, and in 1858 he published Dog and Gun, A Few Loose Chapters on Shooting.
In 1849 Hooper was elected solicitor of the 9th Alabama circuit, but upon being defeated for reelection four years later he moved to Montgomery and established a newspaper, the Mail. He edited this paper until 1861, when, with the assembling of the Confederate government in Montgomery, he was made secretary of the Provisional Congress. But so fully did his reputation as a humorist dominate men's judgment of him that they could never take him, as he was eager to be taken, quite seriously; and though he wished to have a part in the government at Richmond, he was disappointed in his hopes.
Having suffered from tuberculosis for some time, Hooper died in 1862 in Richmond, Virginia.
(Johnson Jones Hooper was born in Wilmington, North Caroli...)
Politics
Hooper was active in Whig politics, and a fervent supporter of the Confederacy; he frequently employed Suggs to promote his own political beliefs.
Connections
In 1845 Hooper married Mary Mildred Brantley, an Alabama woman, the daughter of Greene D. Brantley of Lafayette. They had two sons, William and Adolphus.