Edwin Booth in his Hamlet costume five years after his brother assassinated Lincoln. (Image by J. Gurney & Son.)

Sarah Vowell’s Assassination Vacation relates the author’s road trip to those sad places where American political murder has occurred. I think just about everyone knows that Abraham Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth, came from a famous theatrical family, but Vowell zeroes in on an interesting sidebar: the life and career of the celebrated Shakespearean performer Edwin Booth, the killer’s brother, after the horror of the murder. A passage in which the writer explains to a friend who Edwin was:

“I tell him how Edwin was known as the Hamlet of his day, how his father, Junius Brutus was the greatest Shakespearean actor in England, until 1821, when he emigrated to Maryland, at which point he became the greatest Shakespearean actor in America; how three of Junius’ s children became actors themselves–Edwin, John Wilkes and Junius Brutus Jr.; how the three brothers appeared onstage together only once, in Julius Caesar here in New York in 1864 as a benefit performance for the Shakespeare statue in Central Park;

how their performance was interrupted because that was the night that Confederate terrorists set fires in hotels up and down Broadway and Edwin, who was playing Brutus, interrupted the play to reassure the audience; how the next morning Edwin informed John at breakfast that he had voted for Lincoln’s reelection and they got into one of the arguments they were always having about North versus South; how Edwin retired from acting out of shame when he heard his brother was the president’s assassin, but that nine months later, broke, he returned to the stage here in New York, as Hamlet, to a standing ovation; how he bought the house on Gramercy Park South and turned it into the Players Club, a social club for his fellow thespians and others, including Mark Twain and General Sherman; how he built his own theater, the Booth, on Twenty-third and Sixth, where Sarah Bernhardt made her American debut; and how, in the middle of the Civil War, on a train platform in Jersey City, he rescued a young man who had fallen on to the tracks and that man was Robert Todd Lincoln, the president’s son, so he’s the Booth who saved a Lincoln’s life.”