Prince of Players

New York: W. W. Norton & Company Inc. BOOK: Corners, Spine, Boards Bumped; Moderate Shelf Rub to Boards; Edges Lightly Soiled; Slight Yellowing Due to Age. DUST JACKET: Repaired; Moderately Creased; Moderately Chipped; Slight Yellowing Due to Age; In Archival Quality Jacket Cover. Illustrated. SUB-TITLE: Edwin Booth. CONTENTS: Author's Note; PART ONE 1 Mr. Booth 2 Father and Son PART TWO 3 Seeing the Elephant 4 A New Star Rises PART THREE 5 The Fireside 6 The Palace of Night PART FOUR 7 A Suit of Sables 8 Johnny PART FIVE 9 Another Juliet 10 The Worldly Hope PART SIX 11 Peace and Quiet 12 A Pat on the Back 13 A Kiss from the Heart PART SEVEN 14 Gray Hair 15 The Vulture Hours 16 A Scratch, A Temporary Ill; Notes on Sources; Index. SYNOPSIS: This is the story of the greatest genius the American stage has ever known. It is the story of a man who knew peaks of personal triumph and depths of personal desolation, the story of a character - sweet, generous and strong. People move through these pages as they moved through Edwin Booth's life - his fantastic father, Junius Brutus Booth, the gifted actor who came from England and enthralled the drama-hungry audiences of America; the close-knit family of Edwin's childhood; the two Marys he loved; his daughter Edwina; his fellow-actors Barrett, Henry Irving, Joseph Jefferson. Places and turbulent times are magically evoked - San Francisco in the first flush of '49; New York and Boston in the burgeoning elegance of the '70's and '80's; London and the Continent with their trials and triumphs. Central to them all is the man whom millions idolized - and only a handful knew: the actor whose voice could send a thrill through the most worldly as well as the most lowly; the human being who, after Lincoln's assassination, never again mentioned the name of his ill-starred brother, but in whose bedroom until the day of his death the picture of John Wilkes Booth still hung. When you have read this book you will understand the Prince of Players as few were privileged to understand him in life. Here is biography at its best. Eleanor Ruggles was born in Boston in 1916, but does not claim to be quite a "proper Bostonian," since her mother came from Cincinnati and her father from Hanover, New Hampshire. Her great-grandfather and great-uncle wrote the McGuffey Readers that taught the alphabet along with moral maxims to generations of Americans. She went to Vassar College, where she studied drama with Hallie Flanagan and John Houseman and English composition with the late Alan Porter. She then studied acting in London with the great lady of dramatic teachers, Elsie Fogerty. She was one of the directors of the Dutchess County Players and for a time worked with the Group Theatre in New York. Her first book, published in 1944, was a life of Gerard Manley Hopkins; her second, published in 1948, was a study of the Anglican period in the life of John Henry Newman. Eleanor Ruggles is married to Robert Semmes O'Leary, a native of New Orleans, now an editor of the New England Journal of Medicine. She leads the life of a college-town housewife - mixing housework with going to concerts and reading omnivorously - in a typical college-town, gray frame house in Cambridge, Massachusetts.. Hard Cover. Very Good/Good. 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall.