Genesis of Vaudeville: Two Letters from B. F. Keith

Extract

Fourteen typewritten sheets of paper recently discovered in the effects of Robert G. Larsen, Keith's booking manager for Boston, give us Benjamin Franklin Keith's own account of his life and work. Evidently dictated in the leisure of retirement in 1912, two years before his death, these two letters gather together the facts and legends of a self-made man and the institution, Keith Vaudeville, that he had founded twenty-seven years before. One of these documents reminisces over his early travels, trials, and eventual success. The other papers are presumably answers to a number of inquiries by Larsen about the formative years of vaudeville, 1885 to 1900.