Background
Ashton was born on August 11, 1872 in San Francisco, California, United States, the son of James William Stevens and Hannah Laura Thompson Stevens.
Ashton was born on August 11, 1872 in San Francisco, California, United States, the son of James William Stevens and Hannah Laura Thompson Stevens.
He was educated in the public schools of Oakland, California, and, after a summer reading law in a Salina, Kansas, law office, returned to San Francisco and gave banjo lessons for a living.
From banjo instruction Stevens branched out in 1894 into writing for the News Letter, a San Francisco literary weekly. The publisher of this magazine, Frederick Marriott, was one of Stevens' early banjo pupils; he was so struck by Stevens' comments about a concert they attended that he appointed him the News Letter's music and, shortly thereafter, drama critic.
In 1896 Stevens accepted a position as the drama critic of the San Francisco Morning Call, and the following year he became editor of the News Letter and the Overland Monthly (on which he succeeded Wallace Irwin).
Stevens accepted Hearst's invitation in 1897 to join the staff of the San Francisco Examiner as drama critic.
In 1898 he gave up his editorial work and concentrated on writing for the Examiner. It was during his years with Hearst that Stevens achieved national prominence as a writer and critic.
Following the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906, the dearth of theatrical activity in that razed city led Stevens to leave the Examiner and seek employment in New York. A wire from Hearst intercepted him en route, and he arrived in New York in 1907 already hired as the drama critic for the New York Evening Journal. Stevens worked for the Evening Journal until 1910. In that year he became the drama critic of the Hearst-owned Chicago Examiner (later the Herald and Examiner and the Herald-American), a position he held for forty-one years.
In 1923 Stevens published Actorviews, interviews with actors that had appeared originally in his Sunday column for the Herald and Examiner.
While in Chicago, Stevens built the reputation that led many to designate him the dean of American drama critics. He relished his work, interviewing hundreds of stage personalities and attending hundreds of Loop openings. In his reviews Stevens reveled in bons mots and had a fine instinct for witty epigrams.
Stevens was in poor health in his later years, but continued to write regularly for The Herald-American. He died of a heart attack at his home in Chicago July 11, 1951.
Quotations:
Summing up his own approach to criticism, Stevens once defined his aim in his particular vernacular: "To be right if possible, to be read if possibler. "
According to Theatre Arts, he regarded the theater as "the most delectable form of fiction. The theatre when it is right is the 'perfect service' of fiction. It even provides imagination for you".
"A man can't take too much time in writing, " he once stated. "I don't think you have any right to be any duller than God made you".
In a group he was witty, but also temperamental, ironic, and easily bored.
Quotes from others about the person
Although Stevens, as Gene Fowler observed, "never coddled an inferior performance, he smeared no poison on his critical darts. He brought a gay creativeness to his task, a voice clearly heard, yet so unlike the iconoclastic snarls of those who grow violently wise after a last night's event. "
On December 4, 1900, Stevens married Aleece Uhlhorn, daughter of a San Francisco banker and sister of the novelist Gertrude Atherton; they had no children. Aleece Stevens died on March 27, 1926; Stevens married Florence Katherine Krug, a young actress then working with the Goodman Theatre Company in Chicago, on June 21, 1927.