An Oration Delivered on the Occasion of the Centennial Commemoration of the Battle of the Blue Licks, 19th August, 1882
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Sterling Point Books®: Daniel Boone: The Opening of the Wilderness
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Daniel Boone opened up the American west; more than 200...)
Daniel Boone opened up the American west; more than 200,000 settlers poured into Kentucky on the Wilderness Road he helped establish. John Mason Brown’s classic biography brilliantly depicts Boone’s life and times, delving into all the complexities of this fascinating man as well as the landmark historical events he lived throughincluding the Revolutionary War and Louisiana Purchase.
John Mason Brown was an American theater critic, writer, and lecturer. Brown was a popular figure, extending his public personality from the lecture platform to the airwaves.
Background
John Mason Brown was born on July 3, 1900 in Louisville, Kentucky, the son of John Mason Brown, a lawyer, and Carolyn Carroll (Carrie) Ferguson. His parents were divorced in 1902, and after a year in Switzerland, Brown and his older sister returned to the house on Louisville's Park Avenue, facing fashionable Central Park. There they were raised largely by a nursemaid under the guidance of their maternal grandmother.
In 1913, a year after the death of their father, their mother, who has been described as "a perpetual southern belle, " married James C. Stone, an agriculturalist. Brown had a happy childhood, marked by careful schooling in manners, including dancing classes.
He became stagestruck at eight after seeing Robert B. Mantell play King Lear at Macauley's Theatre in Louisville. This led to a puppet theater and live performances in the attic and regular attendance at every play that came to Louisville.
Education
In 1917, after two years at Louisville Male High School, Brown enrolled at the Morristown School in Morristown, New Jersey. In 1919 he entered Harvard to study drama in Professor George Pierce Baker's already famous 47 Workshop. He joined the Dramatic Club in his freshman year, acted in several of its productions, and became its president in his senior year. He appeared in several workshop productions.
Career
In the summer of 1920 John Mason Brown joined the staff of the Louisville Courier-Journal and began reviewing plays and books about the theater for the Courier-Journal, the Harvard Advocate, and the Lampoon. He also tried his hand, not too successfully, at writing plays for the workshop. Baker apparently dissuaded him from pursuing a career on the stage, either as actor or as playwright, but did encourage him to prepare for a career in criticism.
After graduating cum laude from Harvard in 1923, Brown secured, with Baker's help, an assignment to teach courses in Shakespeare and dramatic presentation at the University of Montana in Missoula that summer.
He then took off on a year-long tour of European theaters with his Harvard classmate and closest friend, Donald M. Oenslager, who became a successful scene designer. Brown revisited the European theaters a number of times thereafter to keep abreast of the modern spirit on the stage. In New York City the following fall, Brown joined the staff of the magazine Theatre Arts, newly become a monthly, as an assistant and within a year was its drama critic and associate editor.
He resigned in 1928, and in 1929 he became drama critic for the New York Evening Post, a position he held until 1941. He then worked for one year as drama critic for the New York World-Telegram. In 1925, Brown joined the staff of the American Laboratory Theater, an acting school, at which he taught courses on the history of the drama.
His career as a lecturer began at the Cosmopolitan Club in New York; the talk was such a success that he scheduled a lecture in Louisville as a way of paying for a visit home in 1925. That marked the first of his many appearances before women's clubs. In 1928 he signed up with the James B. Pond lecture bureau, one of the world's largest.
Brown's popularity grew, especially with women's clubs, prompting the New Yorker magazine to feature a Helen Hokinson cartoon that depicted a woman standing on a platform and announcing, "Next week, our intellectual cocktail--John Mason Brown. " Brown stayed with the American Laboratory Theater until its demise in 1931.
A 1928 European trip, this time including Russia, prompted Brown's first book, The Modern Theatre in Revolt (1929), which in turn secured his job with the New York Evening Post.
That experience probably prepared him for his subsequent sympathetic responses to the American plays of revolt and "social significance" of the 1930's, whose "overstated opinions" he disagreed with, even abhorred, but which had widened both his and the theater's horizons.
From 1942 to 1944, Brown served as a lieutenant in the United States Naval Reserve. During the invasions of Sicily and Normandy he was on the staff of Vice-Admiral Alan G. Kirk. Brown made broadcasts to his fellow crewmen on the flagship Ancon; thirty of these broadcasts were gathered into a book, To All Hands (1943), which includes impromptu remarks the night of the invasion of Sicily. Many a Watchful Night (1944) is an attempt to capture the emotions of war as Brown had experienced them from his vantage point on Kirk's staff during the preparations for the Normandy invasion and the invasion itself, this time while on the flagship Augusta.
Most of Brown's writing concerns the theater; many of his books, in fact, are collections of his reviews of Broadway seasons, such as Upstage (1930), Two on the Aisle (1938), and Broadway in Review (1940). From 1944 to 1964 he wrote a column for the Saturday Review, "Seeing Things, " which increasingly surveyed larger vistas in the creative arts or issues of the moment, like the Nuremberg trials. These essays were also collected into books: Seeing Things (1946), Seeing More Things (1948), Still Seeing Things (1950), and As They Appear (1952).
He served as editor-at-large of the Saturday Review from 1955 to 1969. Brown's other books include the slim Letters from Greenroom Ghosts (1934), five imaginary letters from theatrical personages of the past to their present-day counterparts (such as Christopher Marlowe to Eugene O'Neill); The Art of Playgoing (1936), designed to instruct an audience; and two lightweight efforts, Insides Out (1942), an account of his hernia operation (to ready him for naval service), and Accustomed as I Am (1942), a humorous assault on some of the absurdities of the lecture platform.
Through These Men (1956), revisions of pieces that had first appeared in the Saturday Review, focuses on the political scene in the early 1950's and includes portraits of Dwight D. Eisenhower, Adlai Stevenson (half the book), Henry Cabot Lodge, Felix Frankfurter, Walter Lippmann, and J. Robert Oppenheimer. This book prepared Brown for his most ambitious undertaking, a full-scale biography of the playwright Robert E. Sherwood, The Worlds of Robert E. Sherwood: Mirror to His Times, 1896-1939 (1965) and the posthumous The Ordeal of a Playwright: Robert E. Sherwood and the Challenge of War (1970), which was prepared from Brown's unfinished manuscript by his friend Norman Cousins and includes the full text of Sherwood's play There Shall Be No Night. Dramatis Personae, an omnibus collection of Brown's writing on the theater (including the whole of The Modern Theatre in Russia), appeared in 1963.
He conducted the radio discussion program "Of Men and Books" from 1944 to 1947. He was an interviewer and narrator on the Columbia Broadcasting System television program "Tonight on Broadway" from 1948 to 1949 and also appeared on the American Broadcasting Company television program "Critic-at-Large" the same year. He also worked as an editor for the Book-of-the-Month Club from 1956 until his death, and he served on the advisory committee for the Pulitzer Prize until he resigned in 1963 to protest the denial of the award to Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? In these and many other roles, Brown became a respected molder of public taste in the creative arts and of decency and decorum in public life.
A "Kentucky thoroughbred, " he impressed people with his spontaneity, wit, effervescence, and charm. These traits, reflected in his style of writing, may have been the source of the mixed reviews of him as a critic. Touted by Brooks Atkinson as the only drama critic to have deliberately prepared himself for that career, Brown nevertheless seemed too appreciative and undiscriminating in his judgments. His reputation remains secure, however, as a genial apologist and exemplar of good taste.
Quotations:
Though ballasted with a long historical survey, chiefly of the French theater, it is still interesting for his estimate of theater in Russia: "Crude, infantile, noisy, obstreperous, cheap, confused, and formless [but] magnificently successful in what it set out to be--a propagandistic theatre. "
Personality
Brown was tall, handsome, auburn-haired, and impeccable in dress and manner.
Connections
On February 11, 1933, John Mason Brown married Catherine (Cassie) Meredith, an acting student who met Brown while attending his lectures; they had two children.