Customer Reviews

Eddie Foy: A Biography of the Early Popular Stage Comedian

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Congratulations to author Armond Fields and publisher McFarland & Company for this absorbing, well-written and meticulously researched biography of comedian & eccentric dancer, Eddie Foy. The story, as Fields tells it, leaves nothing to be desired, yet it isn't cluttered with footnotes. It reads easily because it is as defty organized and told as a good stage production. The scene is laid out before us, time and place, before Mr. Foy enters the scene: the Nineteenth Century, the newly arrived Irish immigrants and New York City's Bowery. When Foy's adventures take up the tale, the scene segues to the Civil War, Chicago, Dodge City, Leadville, Denver and San Francisco, and the great and glorious characters who inhabit these places and befriended Foy: Bat Masterson, Wyatt Earp, Doc Holiday, Gentlemen Jim Corbett and dozens of theatrical managers and performers. Foy's life and career spanned the Civil War, the Westward migrations, the reach of the railways, the lawlessness of cattle-towns, the small towns and big cities of a growing America. Show Business grew too, from saloons to variety and Opera Houses, to Broadway musical comedies and vaudeville, and Eddie Foy lived and worked until the dawn of the sound films. Mr. Fields traces Foy's influences and growth as a performer and clarifies the record about Foy's personal life with no intent except telling a good story well and true.