American Vaudeville
American Vaudeville by Geoffrey Hilsabeck, published by West Virginia University Press in 2021, offers a unique exploration of a significant yet often overlooked aspect of American entertainment history. This first edition, comprising 146 pages, delves into the rise and fall of vaudeville, which dominated the cultural landscape from the late nineteenth century until the 1930s. Through a blend of archival research, including photographs, letters, and anecdotes, Hilsabeck presents a narrative that captures the essence of this once-popular form of performance art.
Readers will encounter a rich tapestry of historical insights interwoven with creative elements, as Hilsabeck employs various formats such as scenes, biographies, and prose poems to breathe life into the remnants of vaudeville. The book serves as both a social history and a lyrical reflection on the era, drawing connections between the past and contemporary American life. With its focus on performing arts and comedy, American Vaudeville invites readers to engage with the complexities of a lost cultural epoch while appreciating the artistic legacy that continues to resonate today.
Official synopsis Publisher
A dreamlike, evocative reckoning with a lost epoch in popular culture–and with old, weird America.
At the heart of American Vaudeville is one strange, unsettling fact: for nearly fifty years, from the late nineteenth century to the 1930s, vaudeville was everywhere–then, suddenly, it was nowhere. This book tells the story of what was once the most popular form of entertainment in the country using lists, creation myths, thumbnail biographies, dreams, and obituaries. A lyric history–part social history, part song–American Vaudeville sits at the nexus between poetry, experimental nonfiction, and, because it includes historic images, art books.
Geoffrey Hilsabeck’s book grows out of extensive archival research. Rather than arranging that research–the remains of vaudeville–into a realistic picture or tidy narrative, Hilsabeck dreams vaudeville back into existence, drawing on photographs, letters, joke books, reviews, newspaper stories, anecdotes, and other material gathered from numerous archives, as well as from memoirs by vaudeville performers like Buster Keaton, Eva Tanguay, and Eddie Cantor. Some of this research is presented as-is, a letter from a now forgotten vaudeville performer to her booking agent, for example; some is worked up into brief scenes and biographies; and some is put to even more imaginative uses, finding new life in dialogues and prose poems.
American Vaudeville pulls the past into the present and finds in the beauty and carnivalesque grotesqueness of vaudeville a fitting image of American life today.
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