Debs In Canton is original historical audio fiction.
On June 16, 1918, America’s leading voice of conscience, Eugene Victor Debs, stepped onto a stage in Canton, Ohio, and gave a soul-stirring speech against American intervention in WWI. He did so knowing the cost would be severe: Debs was charged with violating the Espionage Act of 1917 and sentenced to ten years in a federal penitentiary for sedition. The sixty-three-year-old cofounder of the Socialist Party of America ran for president from his jail cell in 1920. He received nearly a million votes.
Debs was an architect of FDR’s New Deal policy that saved the American working class and gave the middle class a chance to build a better and more just life. Today, he is known as being a personal hero to contemporary political thinkers like Bernie Sanders. To those who knew him as “The Man From Terre Haute,” Debs was a simple man, an extraordinary writer and orator, and an energetic believer in the best of humanity and the promise of this great nation.
Debs’s unwavering social conscience and his deeply held Christian faith created the foundation of his political philosophy. But it has never been easy for any man to risk everything—from his possessions, his family, his freedom, or his health—to do what he knows is right. Debs’s crisis is dramatized in Debs In Canton, a new work of audio fiction from SueMedia Productions and MidSummer Sound Company that looks at what his life might have been like in the months leading up to this seminal moment in American history.
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“This well-produced radio drama—complete with the ambient sounds of trains, tavern chatter, and the clink of a cell door, as well as tunefully performed rounds of song—contextualizes the personal and political time…Phil Proctor, as Debs, sounds appropriately gruff and gentle, by turns. The supporting cast…are equally compelling and engaging.”
— AudioFile
“A truly brilliant production! Phil’s performance was perfect…[and] everybody in the cast was just wonderful. Superb work, and the writing was so right for the people and the subjects.”
— Richard Fish, host, WFHB-FM, 91.3FMBe the first to write a review about this audiobook!
Elizabeth Schwartz and Yale Strom are the co-writers of The Witches of Lublin, as well as the filmmakers of American Socialist: The Life & Times of Eugene Victor Debs. (www.firstrunfeatures.com)
P. J. Ochlan is an Audie Award–winning, multiple Earphones Award–winning, and Voice Arts Award–nominated narrator of hundreds of audiobooks. His acting career spans more than thirty years and has also included Broadway, the New York Shakespeare Festival under Joseph Papp, critically acclaimed feature films, and television series regular roles.
L. J. Ganser is a multiple Audie Award–winning narrator with over six hundred titles recorded to date. Prized for versatility, his work ranges from preschool books to crime noir thrillers, from astronomical adventures in both science and science fiction, to Arctic Circle high school basketball stories. He lives in New York City with his family and dog, Mars.
Robert Fass is a veteran actor and twice winner of the prestigious Audie Award for best narration. He has earned multiple Earphones Awards and been named in AudioFile magazine’s list of the year’s best narrations for six years.
Anne Bobby has worked extensively in television and audiobook narration. Her acting credits include appearances on such television shows as Law & Order, As the World Turns, Mad About You, and Cop Rock. Among her narrations are the Katie Kazoo series by Nancy Krulik and the Harriet the Spy series by Louis Fitzhugh.