Circus clown of George M. Cohan. He was also one of the main models for "Uncle Sam". With changes in circus and popular culture after the Civil War, his legendary talents under the big top have gradually slipped into almost total historical obscurity; biographer David Carlyon (2001) called him "the most famous man you've never heard of". While Dan Rice's talking and singing clown was taking America by storm, a new type of clown was emerging on the British pantomime stage, one that would have a more lasting influence on contemporary American circus clowning. George Lafayette Fox was America's first great "whiteface"
The Circus Is Coming (1939) was illustrated by Richard Floethe in a striking but more conventional style. Another notable illustrator was Clarke Hutton whose illustrations for the 1947 edition also appeared in the 1956 Puffin Books edition. John Rowe Townsend describes "The Circus Is Coming" as Noel Streatfeild's best-known and possibly her best pre-war book. Townsend commends the detailed personal research which gives the book so much authenticity and compares it with Streatfeild's perceptive writing on family, suggesting that the circus is a "super-family". Roger Lancelyn Green mentions the novelistic skill and meticulous accuracy typical of Streatfeild's exceptional career books. In her biography of