Percy Hunter Hammond was an American drama critic and journalist. He began his career at the Chillicothe News-Advertiser, then worked for the City Press Association, and finally became drama critic on the Chicago Evening Post.
Background
Percy Hunter Hammond was born on March 7, 1873 in Cadiz, Ohio. He was the son of Alexander J. and Lottie E. F. Hunter. On both sides his forebears were Scotch-Irish, early settlers in Pennsylvania. His father was the leading merchant of the town, but his own interests as a boy led to the newspapers which his uncles owned and to the theatre.
He worked at the age of twelve as a printer's devil on the Cadiz Republican, and a year later he saw his first show in a tent at the county fair. He became a passionate patron of the Cadiz Opera House, where Broadway successes eventually arrived, earning his way in by passing out handbills or acting as usher, in a property coat. But there was paternal disapproval, and at fifteen he ran away from home to Pittsburgh. There he sold newspapers to pay his way into the shows and for a few weeks practically lived in the "peanut galleries. "
Education
Returning to Ohio, Hammond spent the next four years, 1892-1896, at Franklin College in New Athens, near Cadiz.
Career
Hammond moved to Washington, where he set type for four years in the Government Printing Office. He quickly became a crack compositor and made ample wages to buy tickets for all the shows. He saw Fanny Janauschek in her prime and Julia Marlowe in her teens. There and then he made his resolve to earn a living by writing about the theatre.
His long newspaper career began with two years on his uncle's paper, the Chillicothe News-Advertiser. Then came a major shift to Chicago, where he worked at first on the City Press Association, gaining the all-round experience of a police reporter, which he always valued highly. There followed nearly ten years as reporter, editorial writer, and finally drama critic on the Chicago Evening Post.
His first real chance came when he went to the Chicago Tribune as drama critic in 1908. Here he found himself working for a powerful newspaper willing to back him to the limit. His candid reviews, scrupulously honest, often bitingly critical, aroused the Messrs. Shubert to action, and they barred Hammond from their theatres. In return the Tribune threw the advertising of the Shubert theatres out of the paper. It was a historic warfare and ended in the complete surrender of the Shuberts.
In the closing days of the first World War Hammond was sent to France as a roving war correspondent, remaining there through the Peace Conference. Hammond's dramatic criticism for the Chicago Tribune had won him wide renown, and in 1921 he was called to the New York Tribune.
Never overly confident at heart, he suffered at first from a bad case of stage fright and for nearly a year wrote far below his true level. This period was soon forgotten in his subsequent triumph. Once back in stride, he won a wide following both in New York and in the nation at large, for his columns were extensively syndicated. It was the Hammond style, the smooth, apparently effortless prose, the casual wit, the knife-like epigrams, for which he was noted.
For years he had collected words, and from his vast store, aided by the thesauri always at his elbow, he fashioned fresh and polished phrases, their spontaneous tone belying the creative anguish in which he sweated them out, in a cubbyhole on the composing-room floor. In contrast to the older, pontifical school of play reviewing, Hammond had a light, irreverent tone. But he came to the top at a time when the theatre was copious and overwhelmed with trash, and he performed a useful function in ridiculing it.
He died of pneumonia in New York City. There was no funeral service, and his body was cremated.
Achievements
Percy Hunter Hammond was a prominent journalist and drama critic, whose dramatic criticism for the Chicago Tribune had won him wide renown.
Quotations:
In Chicago Hammond warned producers of an offensive leg show that "the human knee is a joint, not an entertainment. "
"Dramatic criticism, " he once wrote, "is the venom of contented rattlesnakes. "
Personality
In his familiar seat on the aisle at first nights Hammond might have been Friar Tuck in the amplitude of his face and figure. There in public he allowed no expression of approval or disapproval to cross his bland cheeks; there was never a countenance more completely deadpan. Yet behind this screen lived a nature shy and sensitive, and as sly as Puck. There would be at times an almost Falstaffian laugh in his enjoyment of his friends' jokes.
Quotes from others about the person
Some felt (as his colleague John Mason Brown put it) that Hammond was "important for his wit rather than his perceptions; his scorn, not his praise; as an entertainer rather than a serious contributor. "
Connections
On May 25, 1896, Hammond married Florence Carnahan, a childhood playmate.
His wife was his dearest and closest friend. Their only child, John Carnahan, was his devoted admirer and frequent companion at first nights. His wife's death in 1935 left him sore bereft.
