George Jean Nathan (February 14 1882 – April 8 1958) was an American ^ b. English is the de facto language of American government and the sole language spoken at home by 80% of Americans age five and older. Spanish is the second most commonly spoken language drama Drama is the specific mode of fiction represented in performance. The term comes from a Greek word meaning "action" , which is derived from "to do" (Classical Greek: δράω, drao). The enactment of drama in theatre, performed by actors on a stage before an audience, presupposes collaborative modes of production and a critic A critic is anyone who expresses a value judgement. Informally, criticism is a common aspect of all human expression and need not necessarily imply skilled or accurate expressions of judgement. Critical judgements, good or bad, may be positive , negative (in dispraise), or balanced (weighing a combination of factors both for and against). Since and editor Editing is the process of selecting and preparing language, images, sound, video, or film through processes of correction, condensation, organization, and other modifications in various media. A person who edits is called an editor. In a sense, the editing process originates with the idea for the work itself and continues in the relationship.
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Early life
Nathan was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana Fort Wayne is a city in the U.S. state of Indiana and the county seat of Allen County. As of 2008, the city had an estimated population of 251,591, ranking it the 73rd largest city in the nation. It is the second largest city in Indiana, after Indianapolis. The municipality is located in northeastern Indiana, approximately 20 miles west of the. He graduated from Cornell University Cornell University is a private Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York in 1904, where he was a member of the Quill and Dagger society.
Drama critic career
Noted for the erudition and cynicism of his reviews, Nathan was an early champion of Eugene O'Neill Eugene Gladstone O'Neill was an American playwright, and Nobel laureate in Literature. His plays are among the first to introduce into American drama the techniques of realism, associated with Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, and Swedish playwright August Strindberg. His plays were among the first to include. Together with H.L. Mencken Henry Louis "H. L." Mencken , was an American journalist, essayist, magazine editor, satirist, acerbic critic of American life and culture, and a student of American English. Mencken, known as the "Sage of Baltimore", is regarded as one of the most influential American writers and prose stylists of the first half of the 20th, he co-edited the magazine The Smart Set The Smart Set was a literary magazine founded in America in March 1900 by Colonel William d'Alton Mann. Mann had previously published Town Topics, a gossip rag which he used for political and social gain among New York City's infamous elite known as The Four Hundred. With The Smart Set, Mann initially wanted to publish fiction written by The Four from 1914 and co-founded The American Mercury in 1924. He was also a founder and an editor (1932–35) of the American Spectator, and after 1943 he wrote a syndicated column for the New York Journal-American The New York Journal American was a newspaper published from 1937 to 1966. The Journal American was the product of a merger between two New York newspapers owned by William Randolph Hearst: The New York American , a morning paper, and the New York Evening Journal, an afternoon paper. Both were published by Hearst from 1895-1937. The Journal.
Over the years, Nathan's criticisms were published in Mr. George Jean Nathan Presents (1917), The Critic and the Drama (1922), The Testament of a Critic (1931), Since Ibsen (1933), Passing Judgments (1935), The World of George Jean Nathan (1952), and The Magic Mirror (1960). Nathan's philosophy of criticism is laid out in Autobiography of an Attitude (1925).
Relationships and marriage
Though he published a paean to The Bachelor Life in 1941, Nathan had a reputation as a "ladies man" -- and one not averse to dating within his field; indeed the character of Addison De Witt, the waspish theater critic who squires a starlet (played by a then-unknown Marilyn Monroe) in the film All About Eve, was based on Nathan. His most famous relationship was reportedly with actress Lillian Gish Lillian Diana Gish was an American stage, screen and television actress whose film acting career spanned 75 years, from 1912 to 1987. Their relationship began in the late 1920s and lasted almost a decade, with Gish repeatedly refusing his marriage proposals.[citation needed]
Nathan eventually married considerably younger stage actress Julie Haydon in 1955.
Death
Legacy
The George Jean Nathan Award, an honor in dramatic criticism, is named after him.
Quotation
- "One does not go to the theater to see life and nature; one goes to see the particular way in which life and nature happen to look to a cultivated, imaginative and entertaining man who happens, in turn, to be a playwright." –George Jean Nathan[1]
References
- ^ Lumley, Frederick (1972). New Trends in 20th Century Drama: A Survey Since Ibsen and Shaw. London: Barrie and Jenkins. pp. 12. ISBN The International Standard Book Number is a unique numeric commercial book identifier based upon the 9-digit Standard Book Numbering (SBN) code created by Gordon Foster, now Emeritus Professor of Statistics at Trinity College, Dublin, for the booksellers and stationers W.H. Smith and others in 1966 978-0195196801.
External Links
Categories: 1882 births | 1958 deaths | American magazine editors Categories: American editors | American magazine people | American journalists by type | Magazine editors | American theater critics Categories: Theatre critics | American critics | Theatre in the United States | Journalists by type | American journalists | Burials at Gate of Heaven Cemetery | Cornell University alumni Categories: Cornell University people | Alumni by university or college in New York | Ivy League alumni | People from Fort Wayne, Indiana
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