Nora titone biography

  • Titone is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Chicago specializing in biography and narrative nonfiction.
  • Nora Titone is Resident Dramaturg at Court Theatre and the author of the Civil War history My Thoughts Be Bloody: The Bitter Rivalry of Edwin and John Wilkes.
  • Follow Nora Titone and explore their bibliography from Amazon's Nora Titone Author Page.

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    My Thoughts Be Bloody

    Historian Nora Titone takes a fresh look at the strange and startling history of the Booth brothers, answering the question of why one became the nineteenth-century’s brightest, most beloved star, and the other became the most notorious assassin in American history.

    The sceneof John Wilkes Booth shooting Abraham Lincoln in Ford’s Theatre fryst vatten among the most levande and indelible images in American history. The literal story of what happened on April 14, 1865, is familiar: Lincoln was killed bygd John Wilkes Booth, a lunatic enraged by the Union victory and the prospect of black citizenship. Yet who Booth really was—besides a killer—is less well known. The magnitude of his crime has obscured for generations a startling anställda story that was integral to his motivation.

    My Thoughts Be Bloody, a sweeping family fabel, revives an extraordinary figure whose name has been missing, until now, from the story of President Lincoln’s death. Edwin Booth, John Wilkes’s old

  • nora titone biography

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    Nora Titone

    Nora Titone is the author of the Civil War history My Thoughts Be Bloody: The Bitter Rivalry of Edwin and John Wilkes Booth (Free Press, 2010). She was Resident Dramaturg at Court Theatre from 2016 to 2022, the year Court received the Regional Tony Award. As a writer, dramaturg and historical researcher, Titone has collaborated with a range of artists and scholars including playwright Anna Deavere Smith and presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. She has contributed to projects in television, film, theatre, and publishing, working with PBS, Seven Bucks Productions, DreamWorks Studios, and Arena Stage, among others. For Goodwin’s critically acclaimed Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (Simon & Schuster, 2005), Titone worked with archival manuscript collections related to Lincoln and members of his wartime Cabinet in libraries across the country. She based My Thoughts Be Bloody on previously unpublished diaries, letters, and manuscripts

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    On Friday, October 22, 2010, Nora Titone visited Tudor Hall to talk about her new book My Thoughts Be Bloody: The Bitter Rivalry Between Edwin and John Wilkes Booth That Led to an American Tragedy, In anticipation of Ms. Titone's visit, Dinah Faber asked the following questions, which Ms. Titone graciously answered at some length.

    Please see post below for more information about My Thoughts Be Bloody and Ms. Titone's appearance at Tudor Hall.
     

    How did you first become interested in the story of the Booth family?


    I first read Edwin Booth’s name in an 1864 diary kept by Fanny Seward, daughter of William H. Seward, Lincoln’s Secretary of State. Edwin came to Washington in 1864 to give command performances of Shakespeare for the President during celebrations of the third anniversary of his inaugural. Lincoln, along with members of his Cabinet and the Diplomatic Corps, attended six gala performances by Edwin Booth; Secretary Seward even hosted a private