George Jean Nathan Biography Quotes 30 Report mistakes

Overview
George Jean Nathan (February 14, 1882, April 8, 1958) was an American drama critic and editor whose sentences and standards helped define serious theatre talk in the United States for half a century. A sharp stylist with a cultivated, unsentimental eye, he judged Broadway by international measures, insisted on artistic rigor, and made the drama column a place for ideas rather than boosterism. In partnership with H. L. Mencken he brought a bracingly modern, metropolitan tone to American magazines, and as a solo critic he chronicled the stage with a mixture of technical knowledge, wit, and exacting taste. His name became synonymous with urbane, uncompromising criticism at a moment when the American theatre was finding its modern voice.

Early Life and Education
Nathan was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and educated at Cornell University, from which he graduated in 1904. At Cornell he wrote for student publications and learned the tempo of deadline prose, an apprenticeship that pointed him toward New York journalism. The combination of Midwestern upbringing and Ivy League polish would become a signature balance in his later work: skeptical of cant, alert to pretension, but confident that the theatre could be a serious art if held to demanding standards.

Entering Literary Journalism
After college he moved to New York City and entered the world of weekly and monthly magazines, where theatre columns were prized features. He began building a reputation for clean, aphoristic prose and for reviews that treated plays as literature and stagecraft, not merely as commerce. This approach, increasingly rare in a period of boosterish coverage, made him a distinctive voice and led to editorial responsibilities alongside reviewing.

The Smart Set and a Defining Partnership
Nathan's career reached national prominence when, beginning in 1914, he and H. L. Mencken took the helm of The Smart Set. Their collaboration produced a magazine at once stylish and combative, and it became a showcase for contemporary writing and criticism. Nathan handled theatre with a cool, exact style; Mencken's political and cultural polemics provided a counterpoint. Together they cultivated an environment hospitable to new fiction and essays, publishing or encouraging writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, and James Branch Cabell. The magazine's tone, cosmopolitan, skeptical, impatient with provincialism, helped set the taste of an urban readership and gave Nathan an ideal platform for his view of the stage.

The American Mercury and Cultural Influence
In 1924 Nathan and Mencken launched The American Mercury with Alfred A. Knopf as publisher. The new magazine widened their audience and influence, pairing social commentary with arts criticism. Nathan's drama columns, written with his trademark mixture of technical analysis and epigram, argued that American theatre should be judged against the best European and American work, not merely by box-office results. In these years he emerged as an early and steady advocate for higher ambitions on Broadway, offering serious attention to playwrights whose work extended beyond light entertainment. He wrote about Eugene O'Neill with particular seriousness, helping to frame O'Neill for readers as a dramatist of major consequence. The partnership with Mencken, though never static, remained one of the era's most visible editorial alliances, and even as their editorial paths diverged in the early 1930s, the Mercury years cemented Nathan's standing.

Critical Philosophy and Writings
Nathan's criticism married form and feeling: he cared about structure, dialogue, and stagecraft, but he also demanded an adult emotional climate, irony without cynicism, passion without bathos. He attacked shapeless melodrama and lazily constructed comedies, and he championed craftsmanship whether in American realism or in imported modernism. He collected his positions and judgments in books that circulated widely among theatre professionals and cultivated readers. The Critic and the Drama (1922) distilled his method at a moment of intense activity, The Intimate Notebooks of George Jean Nathan (1932) offered a more personal ledger of tastes and observations, and his long-running Theatre Book of the Year volumes surveyed Broadway seasons with a memory for details and a cool sense of proportion. The annual chronicle, in particular, became a reference point for producers, actors, and fellow critics who wished to know how a season would look once the applause had faded.

Personal Life and Relationships
Nathan's public life unfolded in rehearsal rooms, opening nights, and the restaurants where theatrical New York took its after-hours temperature. He was a conspicuous figure around actresses and writers, and his companionship with Lillian Gish in the 1920s attracted press attention because it joined a celebrated screen star to a celebrated pen. His advocacy of Eugene O'Neill's work reflected both aesthetic conviction and the social proximity of a small, serious theatrical world in which producers, playwrights, and critics met nightly. Late in life, in 1955, he married the actress Julie Haydon, whose own stage career and later lecturing on American drama made her a guardian of the theatre culture he prized.

Later Years and Legacy
After the peak of the Mencken collaborations, Nathan continued to review and to publish collections, refining a late style that was less pugilistic but no less exact. He remained in Manhattan, attending and anatomizing Broadway and the serious off-Broadway ventures that began to matter after the war. His attention to acting technique, direction, and design helped normalize a critic's right to discuss the full collaborative fabric of a production, not merely the script. When he died in New York City in 1958, obituaries counted him among the most influential American drama critics of the twentieth century. The accumulation of his work, decades of columns, annual surveys, and books, left a portrait of the American stage in transition from commercial showplace to a forum for art of larger ambition. His partnership with H. L. Mencken remains one of the storied editorial alliances in American letters; his early support for Eugene O'Neill is part of the playwright's institutional memory; and his marriage to Julie Haydon tied him personally to the craft he judged. The standards he pressed, clarity, form, seriousness, continue to anchor American theatre criticism, making George Jean Nathan a name invoked whenever the craft of judging the stage is itself judged.

Our collection contains 30 quotes who is written by George, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Ethics & Morality - Wisdom - Justice - Friendship.

• 1924 The American Mercury (Non-fiction)