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William Winter (July 15, 1836
– June 30, 1917) was an American dramatic critic, poet and author.
He was born on July 15, 1836
in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Winter graduated from Harvard Law School in
1857.
William Winter wore many literary hats during his long, illustrious career:
theater critic, biographer, poet, essayist, among them. He is known for his
Romantic style poetry, and for his long career as an editor and writer for
some of New York City's great papers.
Winter was a tour de force in the original Bohemian scene of Greenwich
Village, going on to become one of the most influential men of letters of
the last half of the 19th century and the pre-eminent drama critic and
biographer of the times. Winter became the unofficial biographer of the
Pfaff's Circle of Greenwich Village of which he was a part. The Pfaffians
spawned the careers of such writers as Walt Whitman and Mark Twain.
By 1854 Winter had already published a collection of verse and worked as a
reviewer for the Boston Transcript; he befriended Pfaffian Thomas Bailey
Aldrich after reviewing a volume of his poetry. He relocated to New York in
1856. Winter became a regular at the center of Greenwich Village's Bohemian
hotspot, Pfaff's, where artists, renegades, and radical thinkers of all
kinds converged. This was where Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Winslow Homer,
Edwin Booth, Adah Isaacs Menken, Ada Clara, Horatio Alger Jr and an endless
list of the Bohemian crowd came to mix with the journalists and radical
political thinkers of the times. It was where one came to explore a new
counter-culture in the Village, a salon of the Civil War era where the
unconventional literati would gather-a place where no topic was off limits
and all eccentricities were embraced.
Winter was at the heart of this influential circle known as The Pfaffians
who gathered weekly at the Vault at Pfaff's Beer Hall on Broadway and
Bleeker. The Pfaff Bohemians would lay the foundation for Winter's entire
life and career as both a poet and a writer. He later described some of his
life as a young Pfaffian, describing the extraordinary scene and the many
great minds he encountered in his biography Old Friends (1909). He also
wrote introductions and brief biographies for the editions of the collected
works of Pfaff's regulars like Fitz James O'Brien, John Brougham, and George
Arnold.
"The vault at Pfaffs where the drinkers and laughers meet to eat and drink
and carouse." —Walt Whitman
At Pfaff's, Winter quickly was embraced due to his great wit and writing
talents, becoming the right-hand man to Henry Clapp Jr's circle of
Pfaffian's. Clapp soon made him assistant editor and literary critic to one
of the first truly Bohemian publications in America, the literary and social
commentary weekly, The Saturday Press, in print from 1858-1866. Here is
where Walt Whitman and Mark Twain published their earliest works, and was
the main publication of the Pfaffian Circle.
In 1860 Winter married Scottish poet and novelist Elizabeth Campbell,
raising their five children in Staten Island, New York.
Winter went on to a stellar writing and editorial career at some of New York
City's most influential papers, working as a dramatic and literary critic
for the Albion and Harper's Weekly, as well as Horace Greeley's Tribune for
more than 40 years. His piercing wit and brilliant writing made him the
leading stage historian and theater critic of the 19th century (W. Eaton,
"William Winter").
In the 1880s he began publishing biographies of thespians like the Jefferson
family and Edwin Booth. Winter opposed the modernist theater of playwrights
like Ibsen, and maintained that drama should be a moral force. His 1912 The
Wallet of Time offers a fascinating retrospective look at the development of
nineteenth-century theater; in the preface, he states that "[a] ruling
purpose of my criticism has been... to oppose, denounce, and endeavor to
defeat the policy which, in unscrupulous greed of gain, allows the Theatre
to become an instrument to vitiate public taste and corrupt public morals"
(xxiv). Winter's work on New York's theatrical scene details the careers,
pursuits, and tastes of the major players and plays. He encouraged actors
and writers to acknowledge the "use of a power manifestly greater in modern
society than it ever was before in the history of civilization... and, if
possible, to exert a beneficial influence on the mind of the rising
generation, -- the generation that will support the Drama, determine its
spirit, and shape its destiny" .
He died in New Brighton, Staten Island on June 30, 1917 after a bout of
angina pectoris. He was buried at Silver Mount Cemetery.
Winter left two significant
archives of biographies and essays on stars like Edwin Booth and Sir Henry
Irving, in addition to career papers documenting his work as a writer and
critic. Part of his archive was purchased by theatre and film producer and
collector Messmore Kendall, who donated his collection of William Winter's
papers and books along with Harry Houdini's archive to the University of
Texas at Austin, where it is now available for research at the Harry Ransom
Center.
His enormously prolific legacy is also preserved at the Folger Shakespeare
Library's Robert Young Collection on William Winter.
In 1886, in commemoration of the death of his son, he founded a library at
the academy in Stapleton, New York.
His writings include:
The Convent, and other Poems (Boston, 1854)
The Queen's Domain, and other Poems (1858)
My Witness: a Book of Verse (1871)
Sketch of the Life of Edwin Booth (1871)
Thistledown: a Book of Lyrics (1878)
The Trip to England (1879)
Poems: Complete Edition (1881)
The Jeffersons (1881)
English Rambles and other Fugitive Pieces (Boston, 1884)
Henry Irving (1885)
The Stage Life of Mary Anderson (1886)
Shakespeare's England (1888)
Gray Days and Gold (1889)
Old Shrines and Ivy (1892)
Wanders, the Poems of William Winters (1892)
Shadows of the Stage (1892, 1893, and 1894)
The Life and art of Edwin Booth (1893)
The Life and Art of Joseph Jefferson (1894)
Brown Heath and Blue Bells (1896)
Ada Rehan (1898)
Other Days of the Stage (1908)
Old Friends (1909)
Poems (1909), definitive author's edition
Life and Art of Richard Mansfield (1910)
The Wallet of Time (1913)
A Life of Tyrone Power (1913)
Shakespeare on the Stage (two series, 1911–15)
Vagrant Memories (1915)
Tribute to Winter
From "The New York Press", December l6, 1909 (pdf) |
