Artemus Ward, often called the first standup comic, played a pivotal role in the history of American literature during an 1863 Christmas visit to the Nevada territory when he influenced the career of Mark Twain. Born Charles Farrar Brown in 1834 in Maine, the future Artemus Ward lost his father when young and became an […]
theatre
Rollin Mallory Daggett
Born in New York in 1832, Rollin Daggett moved to Ohio when he was five and eventually worked there as a printer. At seventeen, Daggett became a ’49er following the dream of California gold. Failing to become rich, he joined J. Macdonough Foard in 1852 to found The Golden Era. The famed San Francisco literary […]
Adah Isaacs Menken
Petite – indeed, elfin–Lotta projected a winsome, appealing innocence and a girlish charm even in her mature years. Ada Isaacs Menken’s attraction, like that of Lola Montez, was explicitly erotic. The first years of her career playing romanic heroines-were undistinguished. In the early 1860s, however, she exploited the scandalous dissolution of her bigamous marriage to […]