W. C. Fields: A Bio-Bibliography

by Wes D. Gehring

"All students of the `Great Man's'career will have to rely on this work. . . . Perhaps Gehring's greatest contributio here is his discussion of 23 sketches that Fields copyrighted that are now in the Library of Congress." Choice

Genres: Biography

233 pages, Hardcover

First published December 19, 1984

Reviews

[C Garrett · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The scholar Wes Gehring has drawn attention [in his book, Groucho & W.C. Fields: Huckster Comedians, p.22] to a Twain character, that of the huckstering Colonel Sellers in the 1873 novel The Gilded Age (Twain’s first novel, co-authored by him with Charles Dudley Warner)…[and] Gehring has pointed out the verbal slickness of Sellers, whose ‘tongue was a magician’s wand that turned dried apples into figs and water into wine as easily as it could change a novel into a palace and present poverty into imminent future riches.’ The related resemblance [to the classic American huckster] is tempting.”---Simon Louvish, from his Fields biography: Man on the Flying Trapeze: The Life and Times of W.C. Fields, p.122



“Wes Gehring (Ball State University) is back with yet another of his discourses on the nature and genres of film comedy. Ever since his research on the comic antiheroes of American films, his remarkable studies have ranged from his bio-bibliography Marx Brothers (CH, Mar’88) to American dark Comedy (CH, Dec ’96). However, his classic Screwball Comedy: Defining a film Genre (1983) remains the highpoints of his writings....[In this book on] the 1930s Depression origins of the sister genres of comic courtship---the madcap screwball comedy and the reality-based romantic comedy---Gehring shows how the two grew up into unique and contrasting types. For example, he points to plot pacing and differing emphasis on being funny versus accenting love as distinguishing codes. He presents a specialized portrait on double duty stars Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn, who paired in both genres. His most notable contributions is a survey of modern-era variations and twists on both screwball and romantic comedies, e.g., The Runaway Bride and Sleepless in Seattle, respectively….Choice, March 2003 vol. 40, p1190