Will Rogers (1879–1935) achieved success over a long and varied career with his humorous and incisive commentary on the foibles of American life. Calling himself a cowboy philosopher, he reached a wide following with his stage act, lectures, newspaper and magazine articles, films, radio broadcasts, and books.
The youngest of eight children of a comfortable Oklahoma family, he was born on his parents' ranch in 1879. He was not a very dedicated student and never actually graduated from high school; he ran away from the military school where his father sent him to help him settle down to a responsible life in Oklahoma. Wanting to see the world, he took on a number of jobs that allowed him to travel. He worked as a trick rider in Texas Jack's Wild West Show in South Africa and later toured around Australia and New Zealand with a circus; he then toured the United States as part of a Wild West show and eventually began working in vaudeville shows in New York City as a trick roper. He experienced his first success as a performer when he began telling jokes during his rope act. He worked as a vaudeville performer, interspersing humor with his rope act, for more than a decade.
In 1916, Rogers was hired by the Ziegfeld Follies and quickly became a star of the show. He had discovered that newspaper stories provided great material on which to base his humorous commentary; using newspaper stories as his source material, he was able to come up with comic material for three shows daily with the Follies. By 1919, he had gathered enough successful jokes to create two collections of his humor, The Cowboy Philosopher on the Peace Conference and The Cowboy Philosopher on Prohibition.
After a brief attempt at a movie career in California in 1918, he returned to New York, where he immediately found a different forum for his humorous commentary as an after-dinner speaker. His success as a speaker caught the attention of the McNaught Newspaper Syndicate, and in 1922 he was asked to write a weekly column for the syndicate, a position he maintained for the rest of his life. In 1924, he created a collection of his favorite columns for publication in the book The Illiterate Digest.
In 1926, his career expanded even more. In that year, he was sent to Europe to write a series of articles for the Saturday Evening Post; these articles were then compiled into the volume Letters of a Self-Made Diplomat to the President (1926). He was also hired in 1926 to send a daily telegram for inclusion in the New York Times, an assignment that he maintained for the rest of his life. Additionally, in 1926 he made his first radio broadcast, which eventually became a popular series of weekly broadcasts.
Rogers' popularity increased dramatically during this period, and he was soon sought after by the film industry for a second attempt at moviemaking. He began a new career in sound films with They Had to See Paris (1929) and continued to make films throughout this period, the best known of which were A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1931) and Steamboat 'Round the Bend (1935).
Throughout his varied career, Rogers always managed to reflect the essence of life in America, and the public responded enthusiastically to him. Though his criticisms of the country's current foibles could be pointed, overall Rogers reflected a genuine optimism about the future of the country and its citizens, resulting in the immense popularity that he experienced throughout his career.
