William West

Biography

Wheeling, Virginia—1856—cradled a restless boy who would trade the Ohio River’s hush for the hiss of carbon-arc lamps. By 1911 William West had stepped before the camera as Weary Willie, letting his shoulders sag in a single-reel poem of tramp-life that flickered from nickelodeon to nickelodeon. Two years later he was dodging six-gun smoke in At Bear Track Gulch and negotiating drawing-room scandal in Caste, moving through both Western dust and drawing-room candlelight with the same steady gaze. The lights dimmed for good on 9 December 1915 in Manhattan; the city that never sleeps folded one more of its traveling storytellers into the dark.