[Illustration: P T Barnum From the 1870 edition of Barnum’s Autobiography] M. R. WERNER [Illustration] BARNUM [Illustration: THE STAR SERIES] GARDEN CITY, NEW YORK GARDEN CITY PUBLISHING CO., INC. COPYRIGHT, 1923, BY HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC. All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages, including the Scandinavian. PRINTED IN THE U. S. A. TO JAMES SHELLEY HAMILTON PREFACE P. T. Barnum wrote a voluminous autobiography, the many editions of which have long been out of print. This autobiography is one of the most ingenious and fascinating, and at the same time one of the most bombastic and verbose books in American literature. It will be discussed here in its proper place in detail, and it is mentioned in the very beginning because some explanation is necessary, besides the story of this extraordinary man, for telling it now. Barnum was taken for many years at his own valuation, by his friends and critics alike; those who admired him accepted him for what he himself always said he was, “The Prince of Humbugs,” and those who despised him admitted readily that he deserved that title. His autobiography was regarded during his lifetime as the perfect embodiment of the facts of that life and their interpretation, and no attempt has been made since to review one of America’s greatest shows. In the Preface to some of his editions of the _Life of P. T. Barnum, Written by Himself_, and _Struggles and Triumphs, Forty Years’ Recollections of P. T. Barnum_, as it was sometimes called, Barnum wrote: “There is an almost universal, and not unworthy curiosity to learn the methods and measures, the ups and downs, the strifes and victories, the mental and moral _personnel_ of those who have taken an active and prominent part in human affairs. But an autobiography has attractions and merits superior to those of a ‘Life’ written by another, who, however intimate with its subject, cannot know all that helps to give interest and accuracy to the narrative, or completeness to the character. The story from the actor’s own lips has always a charm it can never have when told by another.” The story from the actor’s own lips is likely to be prejudiced in favor of the author who is also the hero. When Rudyard Kipling first toured the United States, he interviewed Mark Twain. Mark Twain told this young Anglo-Indian, who had visited the Hartford shrine to worship before an American whom he believed to be a master, something that applies to Barnum and his autobiography: