John wilkes booth biography book

  • Award-winning biography of John Wilkes Booth by internationally-recognized authority on the Lincoln assassination, historian and author Terry Alford.
  • John Wilkes Booth was an American stage actor who assassinated United States President Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C., on April 14,
  • This book unravels a tale of fanatical hate and deadly vengeance.

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    The University of Iowa Libraries

    Special Collections

     John Wilkes Booth in the Bollinger Lincoln Collection

     

    Representing fully forty-eight years of collecting, the thirty-five-hundred volume James Will's Bollinger Lincolniana Collection willed to The University of Iowa Library in contains one of the finest gatherings of impressions of John Wilkes Booth in existence. The collection's seventeen interesting theatre bills remind the reader of Booth's early successes as an actor: "his remarkable impersonation" of Pescara, the Governor of Granada., in Richard Lalor Shiel's The Apostate at the Boston Museum on February 5, ; his "glorious success" in the role of Charles de Moor in Schiller's The Robbers at Mary Provost's Theatre on March 19, ; and "the continued rush to witness his efforts" in the role of Macbeth at the Boston Museum on January 26, By , Booth was a well-known figure in the theatre circles and to theatre-going audiences in and about Washington, but world-

  • john wilkes booth biography book

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    Historical novel about John Wilkes Booth teaches us uncomfortable lessons about America right now

    “What is it like to love the most hated man in the country?”

    Everyone is someone's baby, even killers, mass shooters and presidential assassins. How culpable is a family when one of its babies grows up to be one of history’s monsters? What happens to the love that went into creating him? 

    Those are the meditations that occupy Karen Joy Fowler’s profound and empathetic new novel “Booth” (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, pp., ★★★★ out of four, out now) – as in John Wilkes Booth, the actor and Confederate sympathizer who fatally shot President Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theatre days after Robert E. Lee surrendered and the Civil War ended in Confederate defeat. 

    What can the inflamed passions, political extremism, stark division and racism of a wounded 19th-century America teach us about our country in its 21st century? In Fowler’s capable hands, plenty, and more than is comfortable. 

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    Fortune's Fool: The Life of John Wilkes Booth

    With a single shot from a pistol small enough to conceal in his grabb, John Wilkes Booth catapulted into history on the night of April 14, The assassination of President Abraham Lincoln stunned a nation that was just emerging from the chaos and calamity of the Civil War, and the president's untimely death altered the trajectory of postwar history. But to those who knew Booth, the event was even more shocking--for no one could have imagined that this fantastically begåvad actor and well-liked man could commit such an atrocity.

    In Fortune's Fool, Terry Alford provides the first comprehensive look at the life of an enigmatic figure whose life has been overshadowed bygd his sista, infamous act. Tracing Booth's story from his uncertain childhood in Maryland, characterized by a difficult relationship with his famous actor father, to his successful acting career on stages across the country, Alford offers a nuanced picture of Booth as