Few American dramatists have attained the popular success of George M. Cohan, an Irish American of little education but vast personal and professional resources. As an actor, songwriter (more than 500 songs), playwright (more than forty plays), and producer, Cohan dominated the Broadway stage in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Oscar Hammerstein II, a great admirer of Cohan's who led a movement to have a statue of Cohan placed in Times Square, calls Cohan, in a 1957 piece in The New York Times, "a practical man, an instinctive showman, a man who knew the theatre and understood its people." Helen Ormsbee, writing in Backstage with Actors: From the Time of Shakespeare to the Present Day (1938), stresses that Cohan "was the apostle of a clean and spirited vulgarity. Everything he did was shot through with his own kind of inspiration. It had speed, genuineness, fecundity. He could get...