Fred Allen: His Life and Wit

Fred Allen died before finishing his autobiography. It was posthumously published as Much Ado About Me, and is quite entertaining. But if you really want to know everything, this is the book to find. Using the Fred Allen archives in Boston and a ton of other sources, Taylor provides an amazing amount of details about Allen's early life and extensive time in vaudeville. The radio period appears well after the halfway point. Such detail can be mind-numbing but Taylor deftly interweaves humorous comments from Allen's notes, letters, and sketches. Taylor has a way with words as well. The main flaw for me was Taylor's loose grip on time. When he would start unraveling a thread about one of Allen's colleagues or Allen's generosity or show more whatever, the when of things quickly got lost.

That said, this is an excellent biography of a vaudevillian and radio pioneer. show less