This short introduction establishes the argument of the book: namely, that “greatness” in American culture is a useful tool to address “change.” The introduction also situates the importance of this history in contemporary discourse and situates the research in the fields of American Studies and Fame Studies.

Clare Siviter and Emmanuela Wroth begin their chapter by establishing France’s best known women actors, Sarah Bernhardt and Rachel, as a barometer for the hypervisibility of French women performers’ bodies. Siviter and Wroth explore two case studies that paved the way for the late nineteenth-century celebrity which Bernhardt and Rachel embodied: the ‘Bataille des Dames’ between Mlle George and Mlle Duchesnois at the start of the nineteenth century and the Restoration rivalry between Classicism and Romanticism personified by Mlle Mars and Marie Dorval. They focus on three particular sites: the women’s physical presence and experience of their gendered bodies including their voices; their often sexualized fetishization in contemporary print; and their memorialization both in their autobiographies and in theatre history. Having analysed the roles of class, gender and sexuality, they return to the hypervisibility of Rachel and later Bernhardt’s bodies, and the important questions these women’s bodies raise regarding other marginalized identities, especially in relation to ethnicity and ‘race’.

What Emerson was doing instead: he was busy building his career as a public intellectual and growing increasingly comfortable in Boston society (“his set,” as he called it). This chapter looks at how deftly he monetized his lyceum career and how he avoided controversial subjects in the lyceum for fear of alienating his audience. Also examined is his participation in various social clubs, the trend being increasingly toward high status over interesting, even abolitionist, membership. One of the nineteenth century’s greatest letter writers, he avoided discussing slavery within his epistolary habit. All his attention was on social connections and popular success.

Late seventeenth-century scholars sought to distinguish themselves from the stereotype of an academic pedant. They developed a new model of a scholar who was "prudent" or "gallant," that is, witty, strategic, fashionable, and judicious in career choices and areas of focus and able to perform fluently in mixed and noble audiences. They aimed to establish their reputations as celebrities by attracting attention in popular genres such as vernacular periodicals. Historians have recently identified this new model as an ancestor of the research scholar. Early modern academics constructed this model in contrast to the stereotype of doctrinaire bookworms committed to a priori systems. Prudent and gallant scholars embraced the change of knowledge over time. From a position of deep ignorance, they nevertheless dared to frame conjectures that might be disproven. They pivoted quickly in response to new evidence and varying audiences. Major exhibited these ideals in his vernacular science fiction, Voyage to a New World without a Ship or a Sail, and in his adoption of Fama (fame or rumor) as his personal brand.

Chapter Five charts Rogers’ move into silent pictures, a dynamic new entertainment form taking the country by storm in the late 1910s. He headed to Hollywood in 1919 to work for producer Samuel Goldwyn, for whom he would star in a dozen films over the next two years. His films combined humor with depictions of ordinary people struggling to surmount some kind of travail or imposition. In 1923, Rogers moved on and signed a contract with another pioneering producer, Hal Roach. Over a two-year period the Oklahoman would complete thirteen more films, while subsequently appearing in a few independent productions and starring in a series of European travelogue films. Involvement with silent films placed Rogers squarely within the new world of leisure entertainment, and further enhanced his status as a celebrity.

The introduction presents Rogers as a figure straddling major divides in American history. He was a Cherokee Indian seeking suceess in a WASP society, and a cowboy from the rural republic of the nineteenth century who becomes a wildly popular humorist, writer, and movie star in the urban society of the twentieth century. In particular, it frames him as a historical figure reflecting four important shifts in this era: the end of the frontier, the development of a consumer culture of abundance and personality, the emergence of modern celebrity, and the sharpening of a populist ethos in culture and politics. Finally, it frames Rogers as a historical mediator who helped Americans ease their way from one historical era to another.

Chapter Four treats Rogers’ alliance with Florenz Ziegfeld, whose popular Zeigfeld Follies made him the leading entertainer in early twentieth-century America. When the Oklahoman joined the show, he served as a cowboy counterpoint to the glamorous Ziegfeld Girls and sophisticated urban dancers and comedians. Rogers’ witty observations and droll comments on the events and values of the day, delivered in a drawling voice and homespun manner, delighted city audiences and critics alike. Attired in cowboy clothes and often twirling a rope, his humorous monologues and shrewd observations sharpened his image as a plainspoken man of the people, a national star, and a celebrity.

Chapter Ten analyzes Will Rogers the private individual. Looking at the real person behind the celebrity entertainer and writer, it focuses on several personal qualities that defined his adult life. He manifested a great loyalty to his wife, four children, and the idea of family. He maintained his rural roots, sustaining a lifelong attraction to riding and roping, horses and cattle that culminated in his beloved ranch domicile outside Los Angeles. He developed a cadre of close friends from the worlds of entertainment, journalism, and politics. Possessed of abundant nervous energy, he became addicted to travel, both nationally and globally. A man of common tastes in food, clothing, and entertainent, he nonetheless harbored an intense desire to succeed. At the deepest level, Rogers displayed a certain bifurcated quality: essentially reserved, earnest, moody, and sometimes ill-at-ease in private, but tranforming into a witty, charming entertainer and pundit when dealing with a group. Thus the private man balanced an authentic, common man persona with the popular, down-home, humorous image of "Will Rogers" that he crafted throughout his adult life.

Chapter Thirteen examines Rogers’ emergence in the 1930s as one of Hollywood’s most popular movie stars. The development of "talkie" films provided an opportunity for showcasing perhaps the most popular person in America in every facet of his talent: folksy appearance, verbal dexterity, homespun wit, unpretentious but shrewd sensibility. Fox Films signed him to a contract, and from 1929 to 1935 he starred in a series of popular films that combined his trademark humor with common-man characters struggling with, and overcoming, pressing trials and challenges. These populist films often touted the virtues of rural and small-town life, hard work, plain-spoken morality, and community loyalty. Rogers made a trio of such films with famed director John Ford. The humorist became such a popular movie star and celebrity that he was judged to be Hollywood’s top box office attraction in 1934. Rogers’ success as a "talkie" movie star provided the capstone of his career and cemented his status as an American folk hero.

This chapter examines Kerouac’s later novels such as Big Sur, Satori in Paris, Desolation Angels, and Vanity of Duluoz, showing how he developed a “late style” that was a response to the way his image and writing were commodified by popular and literary culture. These late novels portray the author-narrator as out of step with a culture that has passed him by, as Kerouac suggests the ways his fame as the so-called “King of the Beatniks” led to both his increasing alcoholism, and to new ways of looking at himself in his writing.

Chapter 6 investigates how the duopoly, by radically curtailing numbers, inadvertently transformed actors from vagrants in need of a patron’s protection to celebrities lionized by courtiers and commoners alike. Managerial choices coalesced with the historical accident of a monarch so intimately associated with the theatre that he took two actresses as mistresses. Playhouse architecture also exerted an unexpected phenomenological effect on their status. The intimacy characteristic of the Restoration playhouse transmogrified performed intersubjectivity into the crackling exchange of eroticized energy. Unprecedented social freedom, economic mobility, and even contemporary portraiture attest to their new stature after 1660. That new prominence, however, invited attacks in print and person – against women especially – from men anxious about their own precarious hold on respectability. The choices, contingencies, and memories that made Restoration theatre such an unforgiving business nonetheless catapulted the acting profession toward the celebrity culture that would flourish in the following century.

Toussaint Louverture, hero of the Haitian Revolution, occupies a key space in the imagination of Black masculinity across his own time up through the present day.This chapter traces the way Toussaint Louverture’s body, in particular, is reimagined and represented both as a symbol for Black heroism and, taken together as an oeuvre, as a figure that undoes this masculine paradigm of Black politics. In texts as varied as C. L. R. James’s, The Black Jacobins, Toussaint L’Ouverture, Édouard Glissant’s Monsieur Toussaint, and Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls, as well as visual art, cinema, public monuments, performances, children’s books, and his own memoir, Louverture’s body reads across various times, spaces, and forms as a site of desire, vulnerability, and contested lineage for Black masculine “freedom dreams.” His continued embodied celebrity is more complex than an individual text’s objectification, and instead acts as a recurring scenario of Black political negotiation across key historical moments.

The ten years that Robert Lowell lived in New York City – roughly, the 1960s – were among the happiest of his life as well as some of his most fertile artistically. The city promised a more energetic and engaged life than that he and Elizabeth Hardwick had had in Boston. Lowell’s celebrity was peaking, as he was courted by the most famous political and intellectual figures of the time. Later in the decade, the influence of lithium carbonate promised at last to alleviate the emotional torment that had plagued him and his loved ones. Finally, he began to discover a new kind of writing, one that announced a style and a subject matter beyond those of his “breakthrough” book Life Studies in 1959. But from the mid-1960s onward, Lowell’s view of New York City darkens. Many of his poems and letters indicate sadness and disappointment in New York’s and the nation’s situation.

With his ironic distance and skepticism, Byron often appears to be our contemporary. But is he, or have we remade him in our image? Byron’s life poses this quintessential problem for biography, as the term ‘Byron’ has become the site of artistic and intellectual speculations, and of repeated moral and ethical struggles, as well as continued debate over what really happened. Byron himself believed in the truth of historical record, but he also revelled in the way the imagination shapes reality. His literary personae reify this dual commitment, from Childe Harold to Don Juan. Byron's own story is, like theirs, a tale of self-questioning and of self-forming, mirroring the way in which the art of biography itself has undergone questioning and reinvention. To read and absorb the many biographies of Byron is to trace the development of the contemporary biographical mode, with its meticulous research, its psychological sophistication, and its awareness that imagination as much as fact is required to begin to understand another human being. In this, as it so often seems to turn out, Byron got there before us.

F. Scott Fitzgerald will be remembered primarily for his novels and stories, but during his twenty years as a professional writer, he also produced an important and revealing body of work in the form of articles, essays, and correspondence. The very best of these – the autobiographical pieces written in the 1930s – command the lyrical magic and emotional power of his most lasting fiction. And even at their least meritorious, in the advertisements for himself that Fitzgerald composed as a beginning author, these articles reveal a great deal about the way he wanted to present himself to his readers. Read chronologically, they trace the rise and fall of his career from the publication of This Side of Paradise in March 1920 to his final years in Hollywood. In accepting This Side of Paradise for publication, Editor Maxwell Perkins at Scribner asked Fitzgerald for a photograph and some publicity material. “You have been in the advertising game long enough to know the sort of thing,” Perkins added (Dear Scott/Dear Max, 21). In fact, Fitzgerald had worked only four months for the Barron Collier agency in New York, from March to July 1919, but he did understand how promotion could help sell books and was eager to cooperate in the enterprise. In a letter presented at the American Booksellers' Convention and included on a leaf added to several hundred copies of the novel, he began to establish a public personality designed at once to shock and attract his audience.

This chapter charts the affective-political communities that came together around the character of Jane Shore, the star of Thomas Heywood’s two-part history play Edward IV (1599). Not least of all in the theater, late Elizabethan Londoners increasingly came out to see and be seen. So too did their rulers, including notable forays to the Globe by the followers of the Earl of Essex and by the Duke of Buckingham. Across Heywood’s play, Jane Shore attains a similar degree of political celebrity. In the face of Edward’s incompetence and Richard III’s tyranny, Jane steadfastly defends the commons. Her popularity in the play’s medieval London was matched by her enthusiastic reception on the early modern stage. Edward IV was printed in both its parts six times between 1599 and 1626, and its heroine continued to hold the stage well into the seventeenth century. Together with the evidence of her reception in the theater, Heywood’s play maps Jane Shore’s public: the collectivity of strangers joined across time and space in defiance of royal tyranny and in pity for the beneficent Jane Shore, a populist heroine for the early modern age.

The Stage Licensing Act of 1737 took aim chiefly at contemporary political satire and ad hominem satirical impersonations. But mimicry posed obvious challenges to a censorship system built upon pre-performance review of play texts because the impersonation is manifested in performance, not in the play script. Personal satire in the form of impersonation deserves more scrutiny than it has received because far from prohibiting mimicry on the eighteenth-century stage, the Licensing Act allowed it to flourish. If anything, it seems to have become more prevalent on the British stage after the law was passed than before. How did the law create conditions that increased the incident and impact of mimicry? When was the government spurred to take action against impersonation on the stage? And why did the government generally choose not to take any action regarding mimicry? The answers to these questions lie neither in the words of the law itself nor in the documentary record represented by the Larpent Collection. Looking at performance records and other sources, this essay examines the career of Tate Wilkinson to provide new insights into the relationship between impersonation and censorship.