Subtitle: His Follies and Fortunes
"The life of W.C. Fields is a striking endorsement of Shakespeare's thought, 'Sweet are the uses of adversity'. From infancy, Fields found life laborious sledding, and he took extraordinary measures to triumph over all. Nobody in our recent history absorbed such a buffeting as a child and emerged so relentlessly successful in after life. By the time of his death, on Christmas Day in 1946, he was widely acknowledged to have become the greatest comic artist ever known."—from the book
Robert Lewis Taylor's masterly biography, first published in 1949 and long out of print, fully captures the perverse and cantankerous wit and charm of this great man, his films, and the exceptional life he led, all from his uniquely jaundiced perspective.