The Happy Golfer is a collection of the best articles Bernard Darwin wrote for The American Golfer magazine from 1922 to 1936. The American Golfer is often considered to be the finest golf magazine ever published. Started by Walter J. Travis, Grantland Rice became its editor in the mid-1920s and hired Innis Brown of the New York Sun to be his managing editor. Until 1936, when the effects of the Great Depression finally ended the magazine, the best writers on golf were in their stable: Rice and Brown, Jones, Keeler, Lardner, Hilton, Collett and, of course, Darwin.

Darwin aimed his articles at the American golfing audience, selecting aspects of the game that he felt would appeal to Americans, but not necessarily writing about American golf. There is no doubt that these pieces are not as polished as his British essays, but they are more intimate and spontaneous.

It was Herbert Warren Wind who, more than anyone else, kept Darwin's writings alive. Is it still worth reading Darwin? This is what Herb Wind believes:

"There is little disagreement that the best golf writer of all time was an Englishman named Bernard Darwin. Beyond this, there is a large body of readers, made up not only of golf addicts but of addicts of other sports, who believe that Bernard Darwin may well be the finest talent who has ever written about Sports, not excluding such towering figures as William Hazlitt, Leo Tolstoy, William Faulkner, Siegfried Sassoon, and Ernest Hemingway..."

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