Others who wrote of low characters and low life included Thomas Bangs Thorpe, creator of the Big Bear of Arkansas and Tom Owen, the Bee-Hunter; Johnson Jones Hooper, whose character Simon Suggs bears a close kinship to Flem Snopes in both his willingness to take cruel advantage of all and sundry and the sharpness with which he habitually carried out his will; and George Washington Harris, whose Tennessee hillbilly character Sut Lovingood perpetrated more unmalicious mischief and more unintended pain than any other character in literature. It would be profitable, I believe, to read these realistic humorists alongside Faulkner's works, the thought being not that he necessarily read them and owed anything to them directly, but rather that they dealt a hundred years ago with a class of people and a type of life which have continued down to our time, to Faulkner's time. Such a comparison reminds us that in employing low characters in his works Faulkner is recording actuality in the South and moreover is following a long established literary precedent. Such characters, with their low existence and often low morality, produce humorous effects in his novels and tales, as they did in the writing of Longstreet and Hooper and Harris, but it need not be added that he gives them far subtler and more intricate functions than they had in the earlier writers; nor is there need to add that among them are some of the most highly individualized and most successful of his characters.