(One story features the then-toddler astounding his mother by circumventing the locks guarding her apple cake.) But, in truth, while Houdini had long enjoyed conjuring and circus arts, and greatly admired the magician Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin from whom he would eventually derive his stage name, his path as a magician and escape artist wasn’t always clear.īorn Erik Weisz (Ehrich Weiss), he was four years old when he, his mother Cecilia, and his four siblings immigrated to the United States.
Tall tales about his childhood penchant for lock-breaking and mischief had become widespread.
Different in focus, both books are compelling additions to the voluminous literature surrounding one of America’s most influential showmen.īy the time Houdini achieved spectacular fame, his choice of performance-magic-had come to seem predestined.
Posnanski, in The Life and Afterlife of Harry Houdini, interweaves Houdini’s story with anecdotes about his fans and his professional inheritors. Not that biographers have been deterred on the contrary, they’ve multiplied, and the ranks have just recently been expanded by two more: Adam Begley, former books editor for the New York Observer and the author of a life of John Updike, and the sports journalist Joe Posnanski.īegley, in Houdini: The Elusive American, a volume in Yale’s Jewish Lives series, offers a succinct account of the escape artist’s life and a window into the forces-both Jewish and non-Jewish-that shaped his psyche. The sentence is revealing not in its facts-Houdini was actually born on Main Budapest, Austria-Hungary-but because its falsehoods illustrate the difficulty of attempting a biography of a man who spent his career showing the public only what he wanted it to see. “My birth occurred April 6, 1874, in the small town of Appleton in the state of Wisconsin, U.S.A,” wrote Harry Houdini in an autobiographical essay for the Magical Annual of 1910.
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