American Tragedian


Book Description

When John Wilkes Booth assassinated President Abraham Lincoln, his older brother Edwin was devastated. A leading stage star, Edwin Booth thought his career had ended. But with the support of countless theatergoers, over the next thirty years Booth would overcome the shadow of John Wilkes's infamy and steadily advance a reputation as America's greatest-ever Shakespearean actor, the American tragedian par excellence. Daniel J. Watermeier has, through decades of tireless research paired with his own sharp insight, put together the most complete Edwin Booth biography to date. Drawing on a wealth of archival materials and contemporary theatrical scholarship, American Tragedian: The Life of Edwin Booth gives more attention than previous biographies to Booth's apprentice and journeyman years; his rise in antebellum America to stardom with a new, acclaimed style of acting; his work as an innovative theater builder and theatrical producer; his several foreign tours; and his nationwide tours in the late 1880s. It also addresses Booth's critical reception in dozens of cities in America and abroad and situates his professional activities within the events and trends of the time. As interesting as it is informative, Watermeier's book offers an in-depth look at the triumphal career and tumultuous life of one of the American stage's most celebrated figures.




My Thoughts Be Bloody


Book Description

Historian Nora Titone takes a fresh look at the strange and startling history of the Booth brothers, answering the question of why one became the nineteenth-century’s brightest, most beloved star, and the other became the most notorious assassin in American history. The scene of John Wilkes Booth shooting Abraham Lincoln in Ford’s Theatre is among the most vivid and indelible images in American history. The literal story of what happened on April 14, 1865, is familiar: Lincoln was killed by John Wilkes Booth, a lunatic enraged by the Union victory and the prospect of black citizenship. Yet who Booth really was—besides a killer—is less well known. The magnitude of his crime has obscured for generations a startling personal story that was integral to his motivation. My Thoughts Be Bloody, a sweeping family saga, revives an extraordinary figure whose name has been missing, until now, from the story of President Lincoln’s death. Edwin Booth, John Wilkes’s older brother by four years, was in his day the biggest star of the American stage. Without an account of Edwin Booth, author Nora Titone argues, the real story of Lincoln’s assassin has never been told. Using an array of private letters, diaries, and reminiscences of the Booth family, Titone has uncovered a hidden history that reveals the reasons why John Wilkes Booth became this country’s most notorious assassin. The details of the conspiracy to kill Lincoln have been well documented elsewhere. My Thoughts Be Bloody tells a new story, one that explains for the first time why Lincoln’s assassin decided to conspire against the president in the first place, and sets that decision in the context of a bitterly divided family—and nation. By the end of this riveting journey, readers will see Abraham Lincoln’s death less as the result of the war between the North and South and more as the climax of a dark struggle between two brothers who never wore the uniform of soldiers, except on stage.




Good Brother, Bad Brother


Book Description

On April 14, 1865, five days after the end of the Civil War, John Wilkes Booth fired a single shot and changed the course of American history. His infamous deed cost him his life and brought notoriety and shame to his family-particularly his elder brother, the renowned actor Edwin Booth. From that day forward, Edwin would be known as "the brother of the man who killed President Lincoln." In many ways, the Booth brothers were two of a kind. They were among America's finest actors, having inherited from their father, Junius Brutus Booth, a commanding stage presence and a rich, expressive voice. They also inherited Junius's penchant for alcohol and impulsive behavior. In other respects, the two brothers were very different. Edwin's introspective nature made him the perfect actor to play Hamlet, while John, with his dashing good looks and passionate intensity, excelled in romantic roles. They also stood at opposite poles politically. Edwin voted for Abraham Lincoln; John was an ardent advocate of the Confederacy. Award-winning author James Cross Giblin draws on first-hand accounts of family members, friends, and colleagues to create a vivid image of John Wilkes, the loving son and brother who became an assassin. Equally clear is the picture of Edwin, who battled his own weaknesses and emerged a pivotal figure in the development of the American theater. Comprehensive and compelling, this dual portrait illuminates a dark and tragic moment in the nation's history and explores the complex legacy of two leading men-one revered, the other abhorred. Book jacket.




Prince of Players Edwin Booth


Book Description

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.




The Brothers Booth


Book Description

The world-famous Edwin, Brutus, and John Wilkes Booth performed together only one time. The Brothers Booth depicts events surrounding that world-renowned performance of Julius Caesar in 1864, events that would change the course and meaning of history itself. Lincoln's assassination and the Civil War frame The Brothers Booth, a page-turning play in which World-History, Drama, Philosophy, even Theology intersect. "The Brothers Booth is a remarkable achievement...meticulous scholarship...poetic dialogue...and topical references." -- Dr. Thomas Soare, Director of the World-Premiere "...exhilarating. The dialogue crackles with wit, wordplay, and allusion calling to mind Shakespeare and Stoppard." -- Dr. Clive Swansbourne "...reinvests the historic event with what theatre does best..." -- Dr. Sidney Berger, Director, Houston Shakespeare Festival Published here in an annotated version with long bibliography, The Brothers Booth rewards both reader and audience again and again. A must read, a must experience, concerning one of the most remarkable moments of all time.




Booth's Daughter


Book Description

The niece of Lincoln’s assassin comes to terms with her family’s genius and tragic history. In March 1880 at age eighteen, Edwina is experiencing many new things. For the first time she sees her actor father, Edwin Booth, in King Lear, a play he had considered “too harsh for a young lady.” For the first time she finds herself squarely facing the burden carried by her family name for more than a decade: the assassination of President Lincoln by her uncle John Wilkes Booth. And for the first time she is in love, with Downing Vaux, an artist whose father, like Edwina’s, is famous. Edwina leaves Downing behind when her father insists that she accompany him on a year-long theatrical tour abroad. Downing is loyal, however, and when she returns to New York, they become engaged. But when the assassination of President Garfield thrusts the Booth family back into the limelight, Edwina finds that she must travel abroad again with her father, and Downing’s devotion is tested. Forced to reexamine her life, Edwina faces a difficult choice between duty and the pursuit of happiness.




Junius Brutus Booth


Book Description

In this, the first thoroughly researched scholarly biography of British actor Junius Brutus Booth, Stephen M. Archer reveals Booth to have been an artist of considerable range and a man of sensitivity and intellect. Archer provides a clear account of Booth’s professional and personal life and places him in relationship to his contemporaries, particularly Edmund Kean and William Charles Macready. From 1817 to 1852 Junius Brutus Booth toured throughout North America, enjoying a reputation as the most distinguished Shakespearean tragedian on the American continent. Still, he yearned for success on the British stage, a goal he never attained. His public image as a drunken, dangerous lunatic obscured a private life filled with the richness of a close and loyal family. The worldwide fame assured for the Booth family of actors by John Wilkes Booth’s bone-shattering leap from the President’s box had eluded Junius Brutus Booth throughout his lifelong exile in America. But from that event until today, no American family of actors has stimulated such scrutiny as the Booths. Eight years of research, pursuing Booth from Amsterdam to San Francisco, has resulted in an accurate, fascinating narrative that both records and illuminates the actor’s life.




Our American Cousin


Book Description

Our American Cousin is a three-act play written by English playwright Tom Taylor. The play opened in London in 1858 but quickly made its way to the U.S. and premiered at Laura Keene’s Theatre in New York City later that year. It remained popular in the U.S. and England for the next several decades. Its most notable claim to fame, however, is that it was the play U.S. President Abraham Lincoln was watching on April 14, 1865 when he was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth, who used his knowledge of the script to shoot Lincoln during a more raucous scene. The play is a classic Victorian farce with a whole range of stereotyped characters, business, and many entrances and exits. The plot features a boorish but honest American cousin who travels to the aristocratic English countryside to claim his inheritance, and then quickly becomes swept up in the family’s affairs. An inevitable rescue of the family’s fortunes and of the various damsels in distress ensues. Our American Cousin was originally written as a farce for an English audience, with the laughs coming mostly at the expense of the naive American character. But after it moved to the U.S. it was eventually recast as a comedy where English caricatures like the pompous Lord Dundreary soon became the primary source of hilarity. This early version, published in 1869, contains fewer of that character’s nonsensical adages, which soon came to be known as “Dundrearyisms,” and for which the play eventually gained much of its popular appeal.




Right Or Wrong, God Judge Me


Book Description

All of the known writings of John Wilkes Booth are included in this collection. Of this wealth of material, the most important item is a previously unpublished twenty-page manuscript discovered at the Players Club in Manhattan. Written by Booth in 1860 in a form similar to Mark Antony's funeral oration in Julius Caesar, it makes clear that his hatred for Lincoln was formed early and was deeply rooted in his pro-slavery and pro-Southern ideology. Also included in the nearly seventy documents are six love letters to a seventeen-year-old Boston girl, Isabel Sumner, written during the summer of 1864, when Booth was conspiring against Lincoln; several explicit statements of Booth's political convictions; and the diary he kept during his futile twelve-day flight after the assassination. The documents show that Booth, although opinionated and impulsive, was not an isolated madman. Rather, he was a highly successful actor and ladies' man who also was a Confederate agent. Along with many others, he believed that Lincoln was a tyrant whose policies threatened civil liberties. --From publisher's description.




Backstage at the Lincoln Assassination


Book Description

April 14, 1865. A famous actor pulls a trigger in the presidential balcony, leaps to the stage and escapes, as the president lies fatally wounded. In the panic that follows, forty-six terrified people scatter in and around Ford’s Theater as soldiers take up stations by the doors and the audience surges into the streets chanting, “Burn the place down!” This is the untold story of Lincoln’s assassination: the forty-six stage hands, actors, and theater workers on hand for the bewildering events in the theater that night, and what each of them witnessed in the chaos-streaked hours before John Wilkes Booth was discovered to be the culprit. In Backstage at the Lincoln Assassination, historian Thomas A. Bogar delves into previously unpublished sources to tell the story of Lincoln’s assassination from behind the curtain, and the tale is shocking. Police rounded up and arrested dozens of innocent people, wasting time that allowed the real culprit to get further away. Some closely connected to John Wilkes Booth were not even questioned, while innocent witnesses were relentlessly pursued. Booth was more connected with the production than you might have known—learn how he knew each member of the cast and crew, which was a hotbed of secessionist resentment. Backstage at the Lincoln Assassination also tells the story of what happened to each of these witnesses to history, after the investigation was over—how each one lived their lives after seeing one of America’s greatest presidents shot dead without warning. Backstage at the Lincoln Assassination is an exquisitely detailed look at this famous event from an entirely new angle. It is must reading for anyone fascinated with the saga of Lincoln’s life and the Civil War era.




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