Volume 56, Number 16 · October 22, 2009
Who Was the Most Famous of All?
By Robert Gottlieb
Joseph Jefferson: Dean of the American Theatre
by Arthur W. Bloom
Frederic C. Beil, 506 pp., $35.00
The Man Who Was Rip Van Winkle: Joseph Jefferson and Nineteenth-Century American Theatre
by Benjamin McArthur
Yale University Press, 438 pp., $45.00
The Autobiography of Joseph Jefferson
by Joseph Jefferson
Century, 501 pp. (1889–1890)
'Did you ever see Jefferson?' George Hurstwood asks Sister Carrie as he leans toward her in the Chicago theater to which he's invited her and her 'husband,' Charlie Drouet; 'He's delightful, delightful.' And when Hurstwood reports to his wife that the play was very good, 'only it's the same old thing, 'Rip Van Winkle,'' every contemporary reader of Sister Carrie would have known exactly what he was talking about. Long before 1900, when Dreiser's novel was published, Joe Jefferson was the most famous actor in America, and the richest. He was also the most beloved, his unparalleled genius for blending humor and pathos having endeared him to the entire national audience.
Review, 4519 words
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