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Palgrave Macmillan
Book cover

W. C. Fields from Sound Film and Radio Comedy to Stardom

Becoming a Cultural Icon

  • Book
  • Nov 2018

Overview

  • Completes the first biography to use the recently opened W.C. Papers at the Film Academy in Beverly Hills
  • Describes both Fields's private life and showbusiness career and how they intertwined
  • Explores how Fields became a cultural icon in the 1960s and 1970s

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History (PSTPH)

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Table of contents (25 chapters)

  1. The Comeback

  2. The Bountiful Years: 1933–1934

  3. 1935: A Remarkable Year!

  4. Off-Screen

  5. From Radio to the Screen

Keywords

About this book

W. C. Fields is known as a virtuoso comedian and legendary iconoclast who gave the gift of laughter to multitudes. As the first author to use the newly-opened Fields Papers at the Academy library, Arthur Frank Wertheim illuminates the comedian’s arduous ascent to stardom during Hollywood's golden age. The book reveals details of Fields’s turbulent private life, from his wife's refusal to divorce, to his estranged son, and to his fleeting relationships with women. Here is a portrait of an aggrieved artist whose emotional anguish found refuge in his poignant comedy about life’s frustrations and the human condition. This third volume in Wertheim's trilogy documents Fields's rise to iconic status during the counterculture 1960s, creating a legacy of his comedy for generations to come.

Reviews

“A thorough, insightful study not only of Fields’ film comedies, but of the inner turmoil that fueled his genius.” (Kirkus, kirkusreviews.com, December 29, 2019)

Authors and Affiliations

  • Independent Scholar, Rancho Palos Verdes, USA

    Arthur Frank Wertheim

About the author

Arthur Frank Wertheim is the author of the first two volumes in the W.C. Fields trilogy illuminating the comedian’s life and career: W. C. Fields from Burlesque and Vaudeville to Broadway (Palgrave, 2014) and W.C. Fields from the Ziegfeld Follies and Broadway Stage to the Screen (Palgrave, 2016).

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