| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Eugene Field and His Age. By Lewis O. Saum. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001. xii, 324 pp. $50.00, ISBN 0-8032-4287-5.)

A reader possessing little knowledge of Gilded Age politics or recognizing Eugene Field, if at all, as the author of "Little Boy Blue" and "Wynken, Blynken, and Nod" would do well to begin this book with the epilogue. Only there does it become clear that Eugene Field and His Age is an extended apologia for Field's life's work and for the age as well. Only there does Lewis O. Saum outline in detail the many ways that time and changing fashions in journalism and literature have eroded Field's once-formidable reputation. The whimsical blending of fact and fiction in Field's humorous treatment of his local contemporaries in politics, theater, sports, and literature now seems immature, and the orthodox republicanism of his coverage now flouts assumptions of both journalistic objectivity and academic liberalism. His most prominent poetic subjects, western eccentrics and ethereal children, have long since been dismissed for sentimentality. . . .

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