Book Review: Tent Show: Arthur Names and His "Famous" Players by Donald W. Whisenhunt

Authors

Terry Wunder, University of Maine at Fort Kent

Date of this Version

May 2002

Comments

Published in Great Plains Quarterly, vol. 22, no. 2 (Spring 2002). Published by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Copyright © 2000 Center for Great Plains Studies. Used by permission.

Abstract

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, tent shows traveled throughout much of the United States, achieving their greatest success prior to the 1920s and gradually disappearing by the 1950s. Small towns in areas like the Great Plains looked forward with great anticipation to their form of entertainment tailored specially for rural audiences.

Tent Show is the story of Art Names and how he and his partner William Whisenhunt managed to maintain a traveling tent show until Names's death in 1945. Donald W. Whisenhunt, through research in Names's papers and interviews with his family members and friends, gives an account of tent show survival through the Plains states of Texas, Oklahoma, Colorado, and Kansas.