Johnson Jones Hooper: Creator of Simon Suggs

Johnson Jones Hooper was born in Wilmington in eighteen fifteen and grew up to become one of the South's most celebrated humorists. He moved to Alabama as a young man, studied law, and edited newspapers, but his fame rests on a single fictional creation: Captain Simon Suggs, a frontier con man whose motto was, it is good to be shifty in a new country. Published in eighteen forty-five, the Simon Suggs stories placed Hooper in the tradition of Old Southwestern Humor alongside writers who depicted the rough, swindling, hard-drinking world of the frontier South.

Mark Twain knew and admired the work. Hooper's great-grandfather had signed the Declaration of Independence, but Johnson Jones himself remained a Southerner to the end, dying in eighteen sixty-two after serving as secretary of the Provisional Confederate Congress.