Carole Lombard

For millions of movie fans during the 1930s, an actress from Fort Wayne, Indiana, personified the madcap adventures of their favorite form of screen comedy-screwball. Nicknamed “The Hoosier Tornado” for her energetic personality, Carole Lombard did as much as anyone to define the genre, delighting audiences with her zany antics in such films as Twentieth Century, My Man Godfrey, Nothing Sacred, and To Be or Not to Be. She also captured America’s attention through her romance with and eventual marriage to screen idol Clark Gable.In this inaugural volume in the Indiana Historical Society Press’s Indiana Biography series, Wes D. Gehring, a noted authority on film comedy, examines Lombard’s legacy, focusing on both the public and private figure from her early days as merely beautiful window dressing in Mack Sennett silent films, to her development as the leading motion-picture comedienne of her time, to her tragic death in a January 1942 plane crash following a successful war-bond rally in Indianapolis. He also explores the rapport this sometimes “Profane Angel” (Lombard swore like a sailor) enjoyed with not only directors, but also the blue-collar workers who toiled on movie sets. The biography also features a foreword written by Scott Robert Olson, dean of the college of communications, information, and media, and professor of communication studies at Ball State University