Fortune's Fool: The Life of John Wilkes Booth by Terry Alford (review)

There is doubtless a temptation to portray history's antagonists exclusively through the lens of notoriety, stressing condemnation while sacrificing complexity. In Fortune's Fool: The Life of John Wilkes Booth, Terry Alford resists this temptation to great effect. While Alford's biography of John Wilkes Booth of course foreshadows at every turn that fateful Good Friday in Ford's Theatre, it also paints a variegated portrait of one of the most infamous figures in the history of the United States.

Alford's Booth is a complicated creature. Son of the famous but mercurial actor Junius Brutus Booth, John Wilkes Booth struggled to escape his father's shadow (not to mention Junius Booth's alcoholism, mental instability, and scandals). As a young man, John Wilkes Booth often exhibited characteristics that belied the ill-fated course he chose later in life. On the one hand, he was humorous, friendly, a dog lover, good with children, and fiercely devoted to his mother. On the other hand, Booth was also a prankster, a bad student, superstitious, paternalistic, and fond of killing cats. As an actor, his good looks were undisputed, even when his acting chops sometimes were. He bounced from one romance to the next, and he steadily rose to the nineteenth-century equivalent of superstardom. Still, Booth wanted more. With an insatiable thirst for fame and a debilitating regret that he had not fought with the Confederacy, Booth embarked on the course that would make him a household name for the next 150 years.

In Fortune's Fool, Alford demonstrates a masterful command of his source material. Reflecting painstaking research, Alford's work is an immersive experience into Booth's life on both sides of the stage curtain. Alford skillfully navigates the prevalent historiography on the assassin and makes apt use of newspapers, diaries, published works, and personal letters. Alford is liberal with details, even going as far as to document in an endnote the percentage of body weight supported by the fibula (the bone Booth broke during his post-assassination escape). The book's strongest section may be chapter 6, "Life's Fitful Fever," in which Alford delves into Booth's mind and motivations, shedding light on the enduring question, "who was John Wilkes Booth?" (p. 144).

That Alford has produced a compelling and significant piece of historical work is without question. Aside from publishing the first comprehensive work on Booth, Alford also provides readers with a penetrating look into the assassin's psyche. While historians have understandably focused on Booth's last days, Alford's approach is decidedly different. Concentrating on Booth's acting career, Alford mines a wealth of parallels regarding Booth and memorable Shakespearean characters, the most obvious being Julius Caesar's Brutus. The palpable irony of Booth spending much of his life trying to distance himself from his father's last name only then to embody his father's middle name is not lost on readers. When viewed through the bard's eyes, Booth emerges as a tortured and conflicted soul, an actor on history's stage who never fully understood his role as hero or as villain.

As thorough as Alford's work is, a nagging issue remains. What are readers to do with Booth's positive attributes—those attested to by so many who knew the actor? These character references are numerous and effusive, and Alford provides precious little commentary for such quotations. His move here is likely intentional, as it allows the sources to speak for themselves while providing Alford distance enough to neither confirm nor deny the veracity of Booth's contemporaries. Alford entrusts those conclusions to readers, leaving them to ponder the inner workings of a man who, as Alford suggests, was perhaps as skillful an actor in life as he was on stage.