The Letters and Notebooks of Mary Devlin Booth

(Hardback)

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Description

This is the first complete edition of the letters and notebooks of actress Mary Devlin, Edwin Booth's first wife, and is the first reference of its kind in nineteenth-century American theatre scholarship. These documents provide a fascinating perspective on Booth, his life, and the development of his career, and include new materials recently uncovered through the editor's research. The volume is also a valuable guide to biograhical information about Booth's father and brother (John Wilkes Booth), and to studies of Mary Devlin Booth and her influence on her husband. In addition, it identifies sources that reflect certain mid-nineteenth-century attitudes and provides a clearer picture of the conventional role wives had in their husband's careers during that period.

Author Bio

L. TERRY OGGEL is Associate Dean, College of Humanities and Sciences, Virginia Commonwealth University. He has published extensively on Edwin Booth, Mark Twain, James Russell Lowell, and other topics in American literature and theatre and is the editor of The Letters and Notebooks of Mary Devlin Booth (Greenwood Press, 1987).