Josh Billings (Henry Wheeler Shaw)

Henry Wheeler Shaw wrote under the pen name Josh Billings, dispensing folksy, aphoristic wit in a deliberately misspelled, phonetic style that delighted 19th-century readers. In the decades after the Civil War he was arguably America’s most popular humorist after Mark Twain, publishing best-selling collections and a long-running comic almanac. Many of his crisp maxims — later smoothed into standard spelling — still circulate today, frequently misattributed to more famous names.