George Jean Nathan

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 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).

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.).