Origin story
Mar 25, 2022
3 minutes
By Elizabeth Lowry
The Booth family tombstone in Green Mount Cemetery, Baltimore, is, as Karen Joy Fowler describes it in this epic novel about the distinguished 19th-century American theatrical clan, “a marble obelisk… almost twenty feet high”. Like that obelisk, the Booth name still casts a long shadow over the US landscape: today we remember the family chiefly because one of its sons, John Wilkes Booth, was the assassin of Abraham Lincoln.
It’s 14 April 1865. The civil war is effectively over, and President Lincoln is at the
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