Center Ring: Katie Sandwina and the Construction of Celebrity – Iron Game History – November, 2007

Kate Carew, an unconventional newspaper-woman, was famous in the early twentieth century for a “New Journalism” approach to the interview, in which she conveyed her own impressions about how it felt to be in the presence of the Progressive Era’s leading celebrities. To be featured by this print version of Barbara Walters meant the interviewee was a person that mattered. Sarah Bernhardt, Ethel Barrymore, Theda Barrow, D.W. Griffith, Mark Twain, Pablo Picasso, Bret Harte, Jack London, Emil Zola, The Wright Brothers, and Teddy Roosevelt, for example, all made space on their calendars so Carew could do an interview and then draw pen and ink caricatures of them to accompany her stories.