SOURCE: "George M. Cohan on the Dusty Road to Broadway," in New York Times Book Review, April 19, 1925, p. 11.

In the following review, Mankiewicz unfavorably appraises Cohan's autobiography.

It was in the Summer of 1924 that travelers returning from Atlantic City kept bringing to sentimental Broadway the happy tidings that George M. Cohan was writing the story of his life. And great and natural was the rejoicing, for here was an author who had but to tell freely of the things he himself had lived and seen to re-create that exciting glorious era in which the new American theatre really has its fundamental roots.

Twenty years on Broadway—from the beginnings of the century into its third decade! Here, surely, would be the background of a handful of eager, ruthless, tireless, selfish, visionary young men who had carried the American theatre great distances on the surface of a new civilization...