Bottoms Up: An Application of the Slapstick to Satire
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The World of George Jean Nathan: Essays, Reviews and Commentary (Applause Books)
(This anthology represents George Jean Nathan in all the v...)
This anthology represents George Jean Nathan in all the various facets of his long writing career. He has written on marraige politics doctors metropolitan life the ballet love alcohol ä on virtually every major aspect of contemporary life ä and he has had something shrewd or amusing to say about every one of them.
(Excerpt from Mr. George Jean Nathan Presents
Drama in it...)
Excerpt from Mr. George Jean Nathan Presents
Drama in its entirety consists in the surrender of accurate and judicious thinking to emotionalism either to the emotions of its central figure or to the emotions of its second figure (symbolic of the mob emotion) operating upon that central figure and forcing him, breathless and beaten, to the wall. For the partial victory of an Undershaft or a Trigorin.
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(He examines various contemporary problems and situations ...)
He examines various contemporary problems and situations like Art and letters, the Ku Klux Klan, Drama, Vice, Virtue and Censorship, Homo Sapiens, etc.
George Jean Nathan was an American critic, editor, and author. He is credited with raising the standards of play producers and playgoers alike.
Background
George Jean Nathan was born on February 14, 1882 in Fort Wayne, Indiana, United States. He was the son of Charles Naret Nathan, a lawyer, and Ella Nirdlinger. His father reputedly owned vineyards in France and a coffee plantation in Brazil, and had commercial interests in the United States.
Education
He attended public schools in Cleveland, Ohio and was tutored in languages and music. After graduating from Cleveland High School, he entered Cornell University, from which he received Bachelor's degree in 1904, distinguishing himself less in his studies than in dramatics, student publications, fencing, and tennis.
Career
Nathan developed a passion for the theater at an early age, through the influence of a maternal uncle who was an impresario in Cleveland and Philadelphia. Another uncle, Charles Frederic Nirdlinger, who had adapted foreign plays for Broadway and had served as critic for several New York newspapers, helped Nathan obtain a job as a reporter for the New York Herald in 1905. In 1906, Nathan was hired to review the New York theater for two national magazines, Bohemian and Outing. These were the first of twenty such contracts with magazines and newspapers, the most important of which were with Smart Set (1908 - 1923), the American Mercury (1924-1930; 1940 - 1951), Judge (1922 - 1935), and the Hearst chain, including the New York Journal-American and King Features national syndicate (1943 - 1956).
In 1915 he began reprinting (sometimes annually) his reviews and miscellaneous writings on the theater in books. These eventually ran to thirty-five titles. Thus, between his numerous journalistic contributions and these collections Nathan was probably the most widely published drama critic during the first half of the twentieth century. Wide readership was only one measure of Nathan's importance to the development of the American theater. He was something of a theatrical celebrity himself--"The Dean of Broadway, " whose opinions were courted and feared, and whose personal life, especially his alleged affairs with actresses, made good copy for gossip columnists. Nathan enjoyed such publicity, assiduously cultivating the image of an aloof, snobbish arch-cynic and an elegant bon vivant--the bane of playwrights, producers, and actors. In 1908 he rented a three-room flat in the Royalton Hotel, in the heart of the New York theater district. Thereafter he rarely left the metropolitan area, except for summer trips to review the European theaters. Yet Nathan was also a hardworking craftsman, striving to improve the theater according to his lights.
American dramatic criticism was dominated by the pecksniffery of the octogenarian William Winter and the gentlemanly academicism of Brander Matthews. Broadway was enthralled by tawdry melodramas, at worst, or by such "realists" as David Belasco and Charles Klein, at best. Taking his cue from such European-influenced critics as James G. Huneker and Percival Pollard, Nathan adopted a Wildean pose of superaestheticism and a breezy style. He scorned the prudery, pedantry, and phony stagecraft he found on Broadway. Nathan smoothed the path for such important American playwrights as Eugene O'Neill, William Saroyan, and Tennessee Williams.
He also promoted a number of modern European dramatists; he was on intimate terms with such salient figures as Edward Gordon Craig, Adolphe Appia, and Max Reinhardt, and he helped introduce their ideas into American theatrical productions.
In August 1914, Nathan and his colleague H. L. Mencken became coeditors of the monthly Smart Set, which they made into the liveliest, most iconoclastic, and arguably most important American literary periodical of its day. "The Magazine of Cleverness" was the vehicle of their critical opinions and bon mots. They lashed out at "Puritanism" (official and unofficial censorship and prohibition), provincialism, and democratic mediocrity. Smart Set also welcomed a generation of American writers struggling for recognition--including Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Eugene O'Neill, and Sherwood Anderson--and an array of important British and Continental writers previously unpublished in the United States--including James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, and Franz Wedekind. In 1923, Nathan and Mencken abandoned Smart Set. With the publisher Alfred A. Knopf they founded the American Mercury, a monthly that institutionalized in a more staid format the ideas they had developed in Smart Set. In 1925, Nathan resigned as coeditor over questions of policy, although he remained a contributing editor of the Mercury until 1930.
In November 1932, with Ernest Boyd, James Branch Cabell, Theodore Dreiser, and Eugene O'Neill, Nathan founded the American Spectator, a monthly "literary newspaper. "
During the next three years Nathan, the managing editor, published essays of the highest quality by established writers. The Great Depression, though, was an inauspicious time for a venture that was, as one commentator remarked, "the last gasp of The Twenties. " The group was forced to sell the Spectator in December 1935. Nathan and Mencken frequently contributed fiction to Smart Set under fanciful pseudonyms ("Owen Hatteras" was their favorite). But Nathan's major effort in this genre--a roman . .. a clef of the New York theater entitled Monks Are Monks (1929)--was both a critical and a popular failure. More successful were his plays, The Eternal Mystery (1913), Heliogabalus (with Mencken, 1920), and The Avon Flows (1937).
He died in New York City. Because of his almost exclusive preoccupation with the theater, Nathan's reputation faded rapidly after his death.
In October 1957, Nathan, who, like Mencken, scoffed at "religious nonsense, " and whose parents had been part Jewish, announced his conversion to Roman Catholicism.
Views
Quotations:
"The country, is where they grow cherries for use in Manhattan cocktails. "
"There are two kinds of dramatic critics: destructive and constructive. I am destructive. "
''The great problems of the world - social, political, economic and theological - do not concern me in the slightest. .. If all the Armenians were to be killed tomorrow and if half of Russia were to starve to death the day after, it would not matter to me in the least. What concerns me alone is myself and the interests of a few close friends. ''
Connections
On June 19, 1955, while on a Caribbean cruise, he married Julie Haydon, an actress.