p.B. J. Whiting savors proverbial expressions and has devoted much of his lifetime to studying and collecting them; no one knows more about British and American proverbs than he. The present volume, based upon writings in British North America from the earliest settlements to approximately 1820, complements his and Archer Taylor's Dictionary of American Proverbs and Proverbial Phrases, 1820-1880. It differs from that work and from other standard collections, however, in that its sources are primarily not "literary" but instead workaday writings - letters, diaries, histories, travel books, political pamphlets, and the like. The authors represent a wide cross-section of the populace, from scholars and statesmen to farmers, shopkeepers, sailors, and hunters. Mr. Whiting has combed all the obvious sources and hundreds of out-of-the-way publications of local journals and historical societies. This body of material, "because it covers territory that has not been extracted and compiled in a scholarly way before, can justly be said to be the most valuable of all those that Whiting has brought together," according to Albert B. Friedman. "What makes the work important is Whiting's authority: a proverb or proverbial phrase is what BJW thinks is a proverb or proverbial phrase. There is no objective operative definition of any value, no divining rod; his tact, 'feel, ' experience, determine what's the real thing and what is spurious."

This study represents the first comprehensive treatise of American proverbs, each chapter including an interpretative essay, a special bibliography, and numerous texts in contexts. The fifteen chapters deal with the proverb in general, American proverbs in particular, proverbs of the immigrants, proverbs current in the various states, proverbs of the Native Americans, Afro-American proverbs, Benjamin Franklin's «proverbs», proverbs in prose literature, proverb poems, proverbs in popular songs, wellerisms, proverbs in comics and cartoons, proverbs in advertisements, and a special final chapter on the modern American proverb «Different strokes for different folks». A large bibliography, three indices, and forty illustrations are included.