Grow up with the Country: Pete Whetstone Again in the Field

Not until the 1930s did scholars and critics take a renewed interest in the genre; new collections were edited and published, and the frontier humorists began to be appreciated as establishing a tradition developed and enlarged in the works of top-shelf literary superstars. The Arkansas Traveler, Davey Crockett, and Other Legends, devoted a chapter to Noland's Whetstone letters, printed a generous selection, and predicted that a volume-length collection could find a "place on the same shelf with Georgia Scenes, The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi, The Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs, and other chronicles of a hard-racing, hard-drinking, hard-fighting era" (Arkansas Folklore, p. 54).