Although the term implies spontaneity, haste, improvisation, and ephemerality, the sketch has endured and flourished for centuries. Sketches appear in many forms (artistic, literary, dramatic) and with different aims (moral, biographical, journalistic, comic). This class samples American sketch artists and work ranging from the romantic musings of Washington Irving and Nathaniel Hawthorne, to satiric essays of Fanny Fern, Mark Twain, Dorothy Parker, Alice Childress, Nora Ephron, and David Sedaris, as well, according to the interests of the class, as televisual sketches by a wide range of comics.
