John was born on December 15, 1800 in Concord, Massachussets, United States, the youngest of four children of Joshua and Sarah (Avery) Stone. His father was a cabinet-maker, a descendant of Gregory Stone who came from England in 1635 and settled in Watertown, Massachussets.
His early life is obscure, but he probably made his debut at the Washington Garden Theatre, Boston, as Old Norval in Douglas, and he seems to have specialized in old men's parts, like Old Hardy in The Belle's Stratagem, in which he made his first appearance in New York, at the City Theatre in Warren Street, July 10, 1822.
He appears at the new Chatham Garden Theatre in 1824, and there on November 4 his first play, Restoration; or, The Diamond Cross, was performed, Stone playing Diego. It has disappeared, but it was evidently a romantic play, with Spanish characters.
After he had filled engagements at the Bowery and the Chatham and at Niblo's Garden in 1828, his most important play, Metamora; or, the Last of the Wampanoags, was produced at the Park Theatre on December 15, 1829, with Edwin Forrest as Metamora. Forrest had offered a prize of $500 and half the proceeds of the third night for the "best Tragedy, in five acts, of which the hero, or principal character shall be an aboriginal of this country" (Critic, November 22, 1828).
The committee of award, headed by William Cullen Bryant, selected from among the fourteen plays submitted the Indian drama. It provided Forrest with one of his most popular parts and brought him thousands of dollars, none of which, however, were shared by the author. Forrest never permitted the publication of his successes, so that Metamora exists now only in a manuscript fragment, limited to the part of Metamora, in the Edwin Forrest Home for Aged and Infirm Actors in Philadelphia.
From this and contemporary accounts, it is clear that the play provided Forrest with an appealing character, King Philip, the son of Massasoit, who defends his people against the English aggression and finally kills his wife, Nahmeokee, to save her from falling into the hands of the whites, dying himself from the bullets of his foes.
On March 23, 1831, he acted at the Park Theatre in New York at his benefit, when his Tancred, King of Sicily was performed (evidently, judging from the cast, a totally different play from the earlier Tancred). Its first production had been on March 16. And when The Demoniac; or, The Prophet's Bride was played at the Bowery on April 12, 1831, he played Taher Ben Yhudah in what must have been an oriental drama.
He next revised James Kirke Paulding's The Lion of the West, in which James Henry Hackett had been acting since April 1831 the part of Nimrod Wildfire. Since both original and revision have disappeared, it is hard to assign Stone's share, but apparently he wrote a new play, a melodramatic comedy, in which Nimrod Wildfire from Kentucky straightened out all the complications.
Beginning November 14, 1831, at the Park, it became one of Hackett's famous parts. Stone wrote another play for Forrest, The Ancient Briton, produced first at the Arch Street Theatre, Philadelphia, March 27, 1833.
It was an historical tragedy, the action beginning about 60 A. D. in the mountains of Wales, during the reign of Nero, while Suetonius was general of the Roman forces. Boadicea defeats the Romans but afterwards commits suicide. The Britons were painted like the Indians in Metamora.
A prize play for George Handel Hill, The Knight of the Golden Fleece, or, The Yankee in Spain, was produced posthumously at the Park Theatre, September 10, 1834.
On May 29, 1834, he threw himself off the Spruce Street Wharf in Philadelphia into the Schuylkill River.
John Augustus Stone was the author of his most famous work - Metamora. While not the first Indian play, Metamora started the great vogue of the aboriginal drama and established the stage convention for the Indian dialect, a curious mixture of Ossian and the real Indian speech. He wrote a number of other plays: Touretoun, Banker of Rouen, The Ancient Briton, but none of them enjoyed Metamora's success.
He was evidently of a despondent nature, or he may have been made so by the discouraging conditions of the stage.
Quotes from others about the person
Charles Durang, who knew Stone, describes him as "a small man, slight in figure, but genteel. "
He married Mrs. Amelia (Greene) Legge, an actress, who is better known in the history of the stage as Mrs. Stone, and who later married Nathaniel Harrington Bannister.
