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Ryanduffey's List: DGL Vanishing Hitchhiker
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Q: What are the most important features of an urban legend? A: As stated on p. 10 of The Vanishing Hitchhiker: "a strong basic story-appeal, a foundation in actual belief, and a meaningful message or 'moral'." I still agreee with myself, as expressed back in 1981. It's also necessary to say that any legends are "too good to be true," that is, unverified and too coincidental to be taken as literal truth.
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Brunvand's first urban legend publication was an article (based on a class lecture) published in Psychology Today in June 1980. This inspired his first book on the subject, The Vanishing Hitchhiker in 1981. The response to the book was so overwhelming (including hundreds of letters from listeners and calls from the media) that a second book appeared in 1984, The Choking Doberman, followed in later years by several others. (See His Books.)
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"The lack of verification in no way diminishes the appeal that urban legends have for us," writes Jan Harold Brunvand in "The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends and Their Meanings" (W.W. Norton & Company, 1981). "We enjoy them merely as stories, and tend to at least half-believe them as possibly accurate reports."
A renowned folklorist, Brunvand is considered the pre-eminent scholar on urban legends and "The Vanishing Hitchhiker," named for a classic legend, the subject's seminal work. The definition of an urban legend, he writes, is "a strong basic story-appeal, a foundation in actual belief, and a meaningful message or 'moral.'"
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he term “urban legend,” as used by folklorists, has appeared in print since at least 1968.[2] Jan Harold Brunvand, professor of English at the University of Utah, introduced the term to the general public in a series of popular books published beginning in 1981. Brunvand used his collection of legends, The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends & Their Meanings (1981) to make two points: first, that legends and folklore do not occur exclusively in so-called primitive or traditional societies, and second, that one could learn much about urban and modern culture by studying such tales.
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