Livre - Selected letters

“I believe hugely in advertising and blowing my own trumpet, beating the gongs, drums, &c. to attract attention to a show,” Phineas Taylor Barnum wrote to a publisher in 1860. “I don’t believe in ‘duping the public,’ but I believe in first attracting & then pleasing them.” The name P. T. Barnum is virtually synonymous with the fine art of self-advertisement and the apocryphal statement, “There’s a sucker born every minute.” Nearly a century after his death, Barnum remains one of America’s most celebrated figures. In the Selected Letters of P. T. Barnum, A. H. Saxon brings together more than 300 letters written by the self-styled “Prince of Humbugs.” Here we see him, opinionated and exuberant, with only the rarest flashes of introspection and self-doubt, haggling with business partners, blustering over politics, and attempting to get such friends as Mark Twain to endorse his latest schemes. Always the king of showmen, Barnum considered himself a museum man first and was forever on the lookout for “curiosities,” whether animate or inanimate. His early career included such outright frauds as Joice Heth, the “161-year-old nurse of George Washington,” and the Fejee Mermaid–the desiccated head and torso of a monkey sewn to the body of a fish. Although in later years he projected a more solid, respectable image managing the irreproachable “legitimate” attraction Jenny Lind, becoming a leading light in the temperance cru-sade, founding the Barnum & Bailey Circus–much of his daily existence con-tinued to be unabashedly devoted to manipulating public opinion so as to acquire for himself and his enterprises what he delightedly termed “notoriety.” His famous autobiography, The Life of P. T. Barnum, which he regularly augmented during the last quarter century of his life, was itself a masterpiece of self-promotion. “Will you have the kindness to announce that I am writing my life & that fifty-seven different publishers have applied for the chance of publishing it,” he wrote to a newspaper editor, adding, “Such is the fact–and if it wasn’t, why still it ain’t a bad announcement.” The Selected Letters of P. T. Barnum captures the magic of this consummate showman’s life, truly his own “greatest show on earth.” A. H. SAXON, author of many books and articles on the history of the theatre, circus, and popular entertainments, is presently at work on a biography of Barnum to be published by Columbia University Press. For too long the public impression of P.T. Barnum has been one laced with thoughts of humbug and chicanery, with the shadiness of the pitchman. Here, in these fascinating letters, we find him to be too complex, too complicated a man to have such a reputation. The quintessential Barnum, a man we’ve never quite seen before, turns out to be full of ideas and energy, a humorist, a social critic, now beleaguered, now triumphant, a most fascinating character. Stuart Thayer, Former President of the Circus Historical Society