George Jean Nathan

George Jean Nathan (1882-1958) was the leading American drama critic of his time. Active from 1905 to 1958, he zealously practiced what he called "destructive" theater criticism. Nathan wrote during the most important period of U.S. theater's history and set critical standards that are still being followed.

George Jean Nathan was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, on February 14, 1882. He grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, where he graduated from that city's high school. On his mother's side, the German Nirdlingers, there were rugged pioneers who literally crossed the country in a covered wagon from Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, to settle Fort Wayne. Nathan's maternal grandfather was one of the founders of this frontier trading post.

Two of Nathan's maternal uncles were to influence his career as a drama critic. Charles Frederic Nirdlinger was a playwright and drama critic who encouraged Nathan's entrance into journalism. Uncle Samuel Nixon-Nirdlinger was an important theater manager who secured free tickets for Nathan's family; loyalty to this uncle also may have engendered Nathan's rather benevolent attitude toward the Theatrical Syndicate. (The Syndicate was a nearly omnipotent group of theater managers who controlled the American theater in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.) Nathan's mother, Ella Nirdlinger Nathan, was a devout Catholic who attended the same convent school, St. Mary's in South Bend, Indiana, as playwright Eugene O'Neill's mother. The two became lifelong friends, as would their sons.

On his father's side Nathan was French; his father, Charles Naret Nathan, was the son of a Parisian attorney. He was one of the owners of the Eugene Peret vineyards in France and of a coffee plantation in Brazil. Nathan's father spoke eight languages fluently and took frequent business trips to Europe. All through Nathan's childhood the family spent alternate summers in Europe. Young George was thus brought up in an aristocratic and cosmopolitan atmosphere.

Nathan attended Cornell University where he was a champion fencer. He also edited the Sun, the college newspaper, and the Widow, Cornell's humor magazine. After being graduated in 1904, Nathan took a cub reporter's job at the New York Herald. Two years later Nathan managed to secure a third-string reviewer's post, and with his review of Bedford's Hope (January 29, 1906) the most important career in 20th-century American dramatic criticism was launched.

Nathan's personal life proceeded into a routine. He settled into a bachelor's apartment at New York's Royalton Hotel. He remained there for 45 years, the rooms gradually filling with books and manuscripts. Romantically linked with numerous actresses throughout his career (including a long relationship with Lillian Gish), Nathan finally married Julie Haydon, after a 14-year courtship, in 1956. More than the most feared first-nighter in New York, Nathan was a renowned man-about-town (and the model for the acerbic critic Addison De Witt in the film All About Eve).

Dissatisfied with the daily grind at the Herald, Nathan left the newspaper and began writing for magazines. It was here that he began to make his mark as critic. In 1908 he joined The Smart Set as its dramatic critic and met H.L. Mencken, its book reviewer. The two became friends and in 1914 assumed joint editorship of The Smart Set. Here was one of the great partnerships in American letters, for Mencken and Nathan were the arbiters, if not dictators, for what the "flaming youth" of 1920s America deemed worthwhile reading. Nathan and Mencken were much more than trend selectors though; in the pages of their magazine appeared the most influential and artistically promising writing of the era. A satirical poem of the day, "Mencken, Nathan and God," summed up their particular hold on the literate public of the 1920s.

Nathan was most important as a drama critic though, and his crusades against the buncombe of the Broadway show-shop and his avowedly "destructive" methods earned him the hatred of those whose work he scorned; and since he worked hard to live up to his own personal credo, "be indifferent," he made few friends. Among the chosen few, however, were Eugene O'Neill and another playwright, Sean O'Casey. Another writer of Irish background, George Bernard Shaw, considered him "intelligent playgoer number one."

Nathan liked very little, but when he decided to champion a playwright—or a performer—there was nothing he would not do. He never hesitated to use his influence with producers to get plays put on, nor did he hesitate to give suggestions to authors or directors about revisions or casting before plays went into rehearsal. Nathan knew of O'Neill's early experimental plays that were being performed in Greenwich Village, and he campaigned relentlessly to get the playwright produced on Broadway. In 1920 O'Neill's Beyond the Horizon was mounted on the Great White Way by John Williams, due in part to Nathan's influence. For the rest of his career Nathan was O'Neill's champion. He wrote in 1932: "O'Neill alone and single-handed waded through the dismal swamplands of American drama, bleak, squashy, and oozing sticky goo, and alone and single-handed bore out of them the water lily that no American had found there before him."

Nathan said he chose the theater as his sphere because it was a place for "the intelligent exercise of the emotions." In his books Nathan did not so much expound a particular theory or methodology as reveal his own criteria for theatrical excellence. He was an impressionistic critic who argued that personal taste is the ultimate critical arbiter. Nathan established the standards to which all responsible drama critics adhere: the critic owes allegiance to his or her own principles, not to the theater as an institution.

Nonetheless, Nathan's critical hauteur was often at odds with the cap-and-bells style in which he wrote. He was also part of a tradition in American theater criticism. He followed in the wake of Irving, Poe, and Whitman, all of whom fought against contemporary critical trends. Nathan demanded a new and more serious American theater, a theater that responded to artistic needs rather than box office appeal. He deplored the pretensions of David Belasco's productions and the all-American banality of Augustus Thomas. (He was no bluenose, though. He reveled in the Ziegfeld Follies.) Not the least of his contributions to the theater was his unflinching critical independence. Nathan's courage forced the puffsters and pseudo-academic hacks of criticism to flee the field.

Finally, Nathan was able to wield his influence by explaining the differences between the theater that he saw and the theater that he wanted to see. He did so with a singular, if sometimes antic, style that reached a tremendous audience. Nathan's erudition mingled with a zany and breathtaking wit that made him the most famous, highest paid, and most widely read and translated theater critic in the world. He created modern American drama criticism and was crucial to the development of the modern American theater and its drama. In his will he established the annual George Jean Nathan Award for drama criticism. He died in New York City on April 8, 1958.

Further Reading

Nathan wrote over 40 books, almost all of them collections of his criticism. The most important are: The Critic and the Drama (1922), in which he explained some principles behind his criticism; The Autobiography of an Attitude (1925) and The Intimate Notebooks of George Jean Nathan (1932), which reveal critical insights and show the reader something of Nathan's compelling theatrical persona; The Theatre, The Drama, The Girls (1921), probably his best book; and his brilliant Theatre Book of the Year series, which is much more than a theatrical annual—here he intersperses essays about the nature of drama, of comedy or tragedy, of the decline of burlesque, and so forth with reviews of each season's shows (1942-1943 to 1950-1951).

Thomas Quinn Curtiss' The Magic Mirror is the best of the Nathan anthologies. It contains an especially good introduction. There are also outstanding collections of correspondence: Nancy and Arthur Roberts' "As Ever, Gene": The Letters of Eugene O'Neill to George Jean Nathan (1987); and Robert Lowery and Patricia Angelin's "My Very Dear Sean": George Jean Nathan to Sean O'Casey. Letters and Articles (1985). As for books about Nathan, Isaac Goldberg's The Theatre of George Jean Nathan (1926) is a good account of his career up to that time. It also reprints his play "The Eternal Mystery" and a cynical essay on love that Nathan authored at age 16. Constance Frick's The Dramatic Criticism of George Jean Nathan (1943) is rather superficial, but contains additional material on Nathan's later years. □

Nathan, George Jean (1882–1958), born in Indiana, after graduation from Cornell (1904) began his career as a drama critic in New York. In 1908 he became associated with The Smart Set, of which he was co‐editor (1914–23) with H.L. Mencken, with whom he then founded The American Mercury (1924), serving as an editor until 1930 and establishing himself as one of the literary arbiters of the period. With Mencken and W.H. Wright he wrote Europe After 8:15 (1914), and with Mencken he was the author of such works as Heliogabalus (1920), a satirical play, and The American Credo (1920), “a contribution toward the interpretation of the national mind,” which travesties common beliefs and attitudes. While Mencken was considered the great satirical realist of the era, Nathan formed his counterpart as a philosophical snob, cynic, and sophisticate, who adopted a pose of detachment, following the attitude of his master, Huneker, in holding to standards of art for art's sake. In The World in Falseface (1923) he said, “What interests me in life is the surface of life: life's music and color, its charm and ease, its humor and its loveliness. The great problems of the world—social, political, economic, and theological—do not concern me in the slightest.” His many books on the contemporary theater, mainly reprinting essays and reviews, include The Eternal Mystery (1913), Mr. George Jean Nathan Presents (1917), The Popular Theatre (1918), The Theatre, the Drama, the Girls (1921), The Critic and the Drama (1922), Materia Critica (1924), Art of the Night (1928), The Morning After the First Night (1938), and Encyclopaedia of the Theatre (1940). Important for their early championing of O'Neill and other talents, these works vary from scathing attacks on sentimentalities to boundless enthusiasms, for Nathan claimed to write “with a pestiferous catholicity of taste that embraces Medea and the Follies, Eleanora Duse and Florence Mills.” His other books include The Autobiography of an Attitude (1925), epigrammatic self‐revelations; The New American Credo (1927); Testament of a Critic (1931); The Intimate Notebooks of George Jean Nathan (1932), presenting views of friends; The Avon Flows (1937), a comedy adapting parts of Romeo and Juliet, The Taming of the Shrew, and Othello to present the lives of a Romeo and Juliet who do not commit suicide; The Bachelor Life (1941), an apologia; The Entertainment of a Nation (1942); Beware of Parents (1943), a bachelor's advice to children; and an annual Theatre Book of the Year (1943ff.).

Nathan, George Jean (1882–1958), critic. Probably the most famous and respected drama critic of his day, he was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and educated at Cornell and the University of Bologna. His uncle, the critic and playwright Charles Frederic Nirdlinger, obtained a post for him on the New York Herald in 1905, but Nathan soon quit to become critic for two magazines, Outing and The Bohemian. Two years later he moved to The Smart Set, where his name was first associated with that of H. L. Mencken, the pair becoming its co‐editors in 1914. From the start, Nathan railed against the shallowness and hollowness of the theatre of his day and advocated a drama of ideas and the plays of such men as Ibsen, Strindberg, and Shaw. He was the first important critic to extol the genius of Eugene O'Neill, publishing O'Neill's early work in The Smart Set, and in later years he championed the plays of Sean O'Casey and William Saroyan. But Nathan also understood that the theatre thrived by being entertaining, so he endorsed many a flippant comedy and light‐hearted musical. Indeed, as the American musical became more pretentiously artful, he was one of the few critics to maintain affection for the older style. After leaving The Smart Set, he founded The American Mercury with Mencken in 1924 and co‐edited it with him until 1930. He also founded The American Spectator in 1932 with O'Neill and others. His criticisms appeared in numerous other magazines and papers, including Puck, Judge, Vanity Fair, and The Saturday Review of Literature. Among his notable books devoted to the theatre were Mr. George Jean Nathan Presents (1917), The Popular Theatre (1918), Comedians All (1919), The Theatre, The Drama, The Girls (1921), The Critic and the Drama (1922), The Testament of the Critic (1931), Since Ibsen (1933), The Theatre of the Moment (1936), and Encyclopedia of the Theatre (1940). From 1943 until shortly before his death, he edited The Theatre Book of the Year. His will established the George Jean Nathan Award “to encourage and assist in developing the art of drama criticism and the stimulation of intelligent theatre going.”

George Jean Nathan 1882–1958, American editor and drama critic, b. Fort Wayne, Ind. He left the New York Herald to join H. L. Mencken in editing Smart Set (1914–23), which they made into a guide for the young American intellectual. In 1924 they founded the American Mercury, a magazine that fostered the most rebellious and lively literature and drama; for a decade the magazine was the arbiter of American literary taste. Nathan was himself primarily a drama critic, famous for the erudition and cynicism of his reviews; he was an early champion of Eugene O'Neill. He was 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. His criticism appeared in many volumes: Mr. George Jean Nathan Presents (1917); The Critic and the Drama (1922); The Testament of a Critic (1931); Since Ibsen (1933); The World of George Jean Nathan, ed. by Charles Angoff (1952); and The Magic Mirror, edited by T. G. Curtiss (1960). He also set forth his philosophy of criticism in Autobiography of an Attitude (1925).

Bibliography: See study by C. Frick (1943, repr. 1971).

Nathan, George Jean (1882–1958), American dramatic critic, who in 1905 joined the staff of the New York Herald and began his fight for the ‘drama of ideas’, denouncing the works of such contemporary American playwrights as David Belasco and Augustus Thomas, whose popular plays occupied the playhouses to the exclusion of almost everything else. Nathan introduced to America the modern dramatists of Europe—Hauptmann, Ibsen, Shaw, Strindberg, and a host of others whose early work he published in The Smart Set, a magazine which he edited with H. L. Mencken. His most important discovery was Eugene O'Neill, some of whose earliest plays also appeared in The Smart Set. Later Nathan championed Sean O'Casey, being largely responsible for the New York production of Within the Gates (1934), and William Saroyan, whose first work for the theatre, My Heart's in the Highlands (1939), he praised enthusiastically when there was still much doubt as to its value.

Nathan, George Jean (1882–1958), American essayist, drama critic, and polemicist, co-founder in 1924 (with H. L. Mencken) and editor of the American Mercury. He published many collections of theatre criticism and essays, including The Popular Theatre (1918), The Critic and the Drama (1922), and Art of the Night (1938).