Playwright, composer, lyricist, director, producer, and star performer George M. Cohan (1878–1942) looms large in musical theater legend, remembered for tunes like “You’re a Grand Old Flag” and “Give My Regards to Broadway.” Cohan’s early twentieth-century shows and songs captured the spirit of an era when staggering social change gave new urgency to efforts to define Americanism. He was an Irish American who had the audacity to represent himself as the Yankee Doodle emblem of the nation, a vaudevillian who climbed the ranks and packaged his lower-brow style as Broadway.
In Yankee Doodle Dandy: George M. Cohan and the Broadway Stage, the first book on Cohan in fifty years, Elizabeth T. Craft situates Cohan as a central figure of his day. Examining his multifaceted contributions and the various sociocultural identities he came to embody, Craft shows how Cohan and his works indelibly shaped the American cultural landscape.
Written by Elizabeth T. Craft