Download or read book Good Brother Bad Brother written by James Cross Giblin and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2005 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book American Tragedian written by Daniel J. Watermeier and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Edwin Booth written by Arthur W. Bloom and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2013-07-05 with total page 1187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The great nineteenth-century stage actor Edwin Booth began his long career in 1849 as a young teenager, following in his father's footsteps. This biography traces his life and career as a tragic actor, including his childhood; his early acting tours of California, Australia and Hawaii; his rise to fame as a touring star; his two marriages; his relationship with his brother John Wilkes Booth; his disastrous management of Booth's Theatre in New York City; and his death in 1891. The book includes an extensive performance history detailing every known Edwin Booth performance during his more than 30 years on the stage, with reviews and other supplementary materials.
Download or read book My Thoughts Be Bloody written by Nora Titone and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2010-10-19 with total page 498 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Booth s Daughter written by Raymond Wemmlinger and published by Boyds Mills Press. This book was released on 2014-10-07 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Prince of Players Edwin Booth written by Eleanor Ruggles and published by Andesite Press. This book was released on 2015-08-09 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Edwin Booth s Performances written by Mary Isabella Stone and published by . This book was released on 1990 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book John Wilkes Booth written by Asia Booth Clarke and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Features a biographical sketch of the American actor John Wilkes Booth (1838-1865). Notes that Booth shot and killed the U.S. President Abraham Lincoln on April 14, 1865.
Download or read book Booth written by Karen Joy Fowler and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2023-02-07 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Best Book of the Year Real Simple • AARP • USA Today • NPR • Virginia Living Longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize From the Man Booker finalist and bestselling author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves comes an epic and intimate novel about the family behind one of the most infamous figures in American history: John Wilkes Booth. In 1822, a secret family moves into a secret cabin some thirty miles northeast of Baltimore, to farm, to hide, and to bear ten children over the course of the next sixteen years. Junius Booth—breadwinner, celebrated Shakespearean actor, and master of the house in more ways than one—is at once a mesmerizing talent and a man of terrifying instability. One by one the children arrive, as year by year, the country draws frighteningly closer to the boiling point of secession and civil war. As the tenor of the world shifts, the Booths emerge from their hidden lives to cement their place as one of the country’s leading theatrical families. But behind the curtains of the many stages they have graced, multiple scandals, family triumphs, and criminal disasters begin to take their toll, and the solemn siblings of John Wilkes Booth are left to reckon with the truth behind the destructively specious promise of an early prophecy. Booth is a startling portrait of a country in the throes of change and a vivid exploration of the ties that make, and break, a family.
Download or read book The Judges of the Secret Court written by David Stacton and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2011-06-07 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: David Stacton’s The Judges of The Secret Court is a long-lost triumph of American fiction as well as one of the finest books ever written about the Civil War. Stacton’s gripping and atmospheric story revolves around the brothers Edwin and John Wilkes Booth, members of a famous theatrical family. Edwin is a great actor, himself a Hamlet-like character whose performance as Hamlet will make him an international sensation. Wilkes is a blustering mediocrity on stage who is determined, however, to be an actor in history, and whose assassination of Abraham Lincoln will change America. Stacton’s novel about how the roles we play become, for better or for worse, the lives we lead, takes us back to the day of the assassination, immersing us in the farrago of bombast that fills Wilkes’s head while following his footsteps up to the fatal encounter at Ford’s Theatre. The political maneuvering around Lincoln’s deathbed and Wilkes’s desperate flight and ignominious capture then set the stage for a political show trial that will condemn not only the guilty but the—at least relatively—innocent. For as Edwin Booth broods helplessly many years later, and as Lincoln, whose tragic death and wisdom overshadow this tale, also knew, “We are all accessories before or after some fact. . . . We are all guilty of being ourselves.”
Download or read book Junius Brutus Booth written by Stephen M. Archer and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 2010-08-20 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Lust for Fame written by Gordon Samples and published by McFarland. This book was released on 1998-09-01 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first book on Booth's ten tumultuous years on the stage, with a wealth of rare period illustrations reproduced with special techniques yielding results of better quality than the originals. The book evaluates his performances through newspaper reviews and the recorded opinions of his contemporaries; it also separates Booth the actor from Booth the assassin. Previously unpublished letters are included, some in facsimile. John Wilkes' famous brother Edwin was not necessarily the leading actor of his era: this book indicates why John Wilkes Booth might claim that distinction. One of the appendices is an exhaustive chronology of all his performances, and all fellow cast members.
Download or read book American Brutus written by Michael W. Kauffman and published by Random House. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 546 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is a tale as familiar as our history primers: A deranged actor, John Wilkes Booth, killed Abraham Lincoln in Ford’s Theatre, escaped on foot, and eluded capture for twelve days until he met his fiery end in a Virginia tobacco barn. In the national hysteria that followed, eight others were arrested and tried; four of those were executed, four imprisoned. Therein lie all the classic elements of a great thriller. But the untold tale is even more fascinating. Now, in American Brutus, Michael W. Kauffman, one of the foremost Lincoln assassination authorities, takes familiar history to a deeper level, offering an unprecedented, authoritative account of the Lincoln murder conspiracy. Working from a staggering array of archival sources and new research, Kauffman sheds new light on the background and motives of John Wilkes Booth, the mechanics of his plot to topple the Union government, and the trials and fates of the conspirators. Piece by piece, Kauffman explains and corrects common misperceptions and analyzes the political motivation behind Booth’s plan to unseat Lincoln, in whom the assassin saw a treacherous autocrat, “an American Caesar.” In preparing his study, Kauffman spared no effort getting at the truth: He even lived in Booth’s house, and re-created key parts of Booth’s escape. Thanks to Kauffman’s discoveries, readers will have a new understanding of this defining event in our nation’s history, and they will come to see how public sentiment about Booth at the time of the assassination and ever since has made an accurate account of his actions and motives next to impossible–until now. In nearly 140 years there has been an overwhelming body of literature on the Lincoln assassination, much of it incomplete and oftentimes contradictory. In American Brutus, Kauffman finally makes sense of an incident whose causes and effects reverberate to this day. Provocative, absorbing, utterly cogent, at times controversial, this will become the definitive text on a watershed event in American history.
Download or read book American Gothic written by Gene Smith and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2016-10-04 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times–bestselling author’s “lively” account of a family of famous actors—who became notorious after the assassination of President Lincoln (The New Yorker). Junius Booth and his sons, Edwin and John Wilkes, were nineteenth-century America’s most famous theatrical family. Yet the Booth name is forever etched in the history books for one terrible reason: the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth at Ford’s Theatre on April 14, 1865. In American Gothic, bestselling historian Gene Smith vividly chronicles the triumphs, scandals, and tragedies of this infamous family. The preeminent English tragedian of his day, Junius Booth was a madman and an alcoholic who abandoned his wife and young son to move to America and start a new family. His son Edwin became the most renowned Shakespearean actor in America, famously playing Hamlet for one hundred consecutive nights, but he suffered from depression and a crippling fear of inheriting his father’s insanity. Blessed with extraordinary good looks and a gregarious nature, John Wilkes Booth seemed destined for spectacular fame and fortune. However, his sympathy for the Confederate cause unleashed a dangerous instability that brought permanent disgrace to his family and forever changed the course of American history. Richly detailed and emotionally insightful, American Gothic is a “ripping good tale” that brings to life the true story behind a family tragedy of Shakespearean proportions (The New York Times).
Download or read book The Booth Brothers written by Rebecca Langston-George and published by Capstone. This book was released on 2017-08 with total page 113 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today everyone knows the name of John Wilkes Booth, the notorious zealot who assassinated Abraham Lincoln. But in his lifetime, the killer was an actor who was well-known among fans of the theater, well-known but less famous and less admired than his brother Edwin. In the 1860s, Edwin Booth ranked among the greatest and most-respected stars of the stage. He lived in New York and sympathized with the Union cause, while his younger brother stomped the streets of Washington, D.C., and raged as the Civil War turned in favor of the North. John fantasized about kidnapping the president, but after the defeat of the Confederacy, he sought deadly vengeance. The night Lincoln attended a performance at Ford's Theatre, Edwin was far away, knowing nothing of the plot unfolding in the nation's capital.
Download or read book The Brothers Booth written by Marshell Bradley and published by AuthorHouse. This book was released on 2004-08 with total page 124 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Unlocked Book written by Asia Booth Clarke and published by . This book was released on 1977 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
