Does anyone know anything about this Robinson and his family? He was affluent; a doctor and landholder in middle 1800s Georgia area. He evidently wrote for Georgia newspapers - I would love to know more about him and find some of his writings!!! He may have been a plantation doctor... All help appreciated. Diane >From this website: http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/nge/Article.jsp?id=h-988 Georgia Humorists The Georgia humorists were early-nineteenth-century writers who published satiric sketches about the lawlessness and debauchery of frontier conditions in antebellum Georgia. Mostly lawyers, newspaper editors, and other professional men, they included Augustus Baldwin Longstreet (1790-1870), William Tappan Thompson (1812-82), and John Basil Lamar (1812-62). Lesser-known writers were T. A. Burke, T. W. Lane, and Francis James Robinson. More conservative than the later writers who followed the southwestern expansion of the frontier toward the Mississippi River (such Southwest humorists as Johnson Jones Hooper of Alabama, Thomas Bangs Thorpe of Louisiana, and George Washington Harris of Tennessee), the Georgia humorists strove to protect plantation society from further erosion by satirizing the earthiness, deceit, and violence of the frontier. Drawing their topics from the events of everyday life, including hunts, fights, courtship and marriage, dances, horse races and other contests, militia drills, elections, the law and courts, religion, gambling, practical jokes, illness, drinking bouts, and the treatment of country bumpkins in the city, the Georgia humorists used the literary device of the frame to distance themselves and their readers from the harshness of life on the frontier. Francis James Robinson A final writer of interest is Francis James Robinson, who published a collection of seven humor sketches entitled Kups of Kauphy: A Georgia Book in Warp and Woof (1853). Little is known about Robinson except that he was a country doctor and newspaper writer who was born around 1820. Fiercely partisan toward the South before the Civil War, Robinson supported the Republican Party during Reconstruction and apparently died in Oglethorpe County in 1870. Several of the sketches in Kups of Kauphy show the influence of Longstreet and Thompson in theme, setting, and dialect. Robinson also incorporated a lengthy proslavery argument into the frame of one sketch that reveals the impact of the sectional crisis on the Georgia humor tradition. Spokesmen for a social system that rejected the free labor assumptions of the North, the Georgia humorists initially dedicated many of their literary efforts to the cause of moral reform. The escalation of sectional conflict in the 1850s, however, made life more difficult for literary reformers in Georgia. Every agency of cultural expression was enlisted in the defense of plantation slavery as the secession crisis drew near. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~