Mr. Dooley in Peace and in War

Behind the bar of his small saloon on Archey Road, in the Irish quarter of Chicago’s South Side, Mr. Dooley holds forth to his patient friend Mr. Hennessy on whatever the newspapers have dragged in that week. Finley Peter Dunne drew these sketches from the weekly columns he wrote for the Chicago Evening Post, giving Dooley a thick brogue aimed at the politics, war, and social pretensions of the late 1890s. Published in 1898, this first collection gathers roughly fifty pieces, nearly twenty of them prompted by the Spanish-American War and the fighting that followed in the Philippines. The humor is broad, but the target is usually sharp: pompous generals, hollow patriotism, the gap between what leaders announce and what ordinary people actually see. The book became an immediate bestseller and carried Dooley to a national audience.