Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 60-05, Section: A, page: 1632.

Director: Michael Denning.

The term "barnstormer" was originally employed in the mid-nineteenth century as a pejorative to describe actors who made a precarious living traveling around bringing entertainment to rural audiences. Such actors, believed to lack the requisite talent for stardom on the legitimate stage, were forced to ply their trade in barns, hence the term. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, "barnstorming" was expanded to include the travels of campaigning politicians, touring baseball teams, stunt fliers, musicians, and most other performers who made a living in a similar fashion.

The primary goal of this dissertation is to consider different types of nineteenth and twentieth century traveling performers as participants in shared material and symbolic economies; as a collective key to understanding significant shifts in modern American culture: urbanization, the increased capitalization and centralization of the culture industries, and the mainstreaming of previously marginal entertainments and audiences. Specifically, I am interested in the ways in which barnstormers, during the period 1880--1970, influenced the collective sense of the American cultural and physical landscape even as they faded from that landscape. The project is in the form of a cultural history and involves the critical re-evaluation of a variety of texts: autobiographies written by traveling performers, popular press articles, works of literature, and cinematic representations of barnstorming.

The dissertation examines Frank Bacon's autobiographical account of his evolution from barnstormer to Broadway headliner and movie actor, the press coverage of Babe Ruth's "outlaw" barnstorming tour in 1921; William Faulkner's career as a screen writer and the Hollywood adaptations of his literary works, specifically, Pylon, his 1935 novel about barnstorming aviators; stage and film actress June Havoc's literary articulations of her early career as a roaming marathon dancer during the Depression; writer Horace McCoy's classic novel of marathon dancing and life on the margins of the west coast film industry, They Shoot Horses, Don't They?; and the persistence of barnstorming in the autobiographical writings of black baseball great Leroy "Satchel" Paige.