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Burns Mantle was an American drama critic and theater annalist.
Background
Robert Burns Mantle was born on December 23, 1873 in Watertown, New York. He was the only son of Robert Burns Mantle, a local haberdasher, and Susan (Lawrence) Mantle. His parents had Scottish and English forebears. He was christened Leroy Willis Mantle, but after his father died, he adopted his father's name. In later years he was known as Burns Mantle professionally, but he was called Robert at home. After his father's death, his mother supported the family by giving music lessons. When he was a youth the Mantle family consisting of his mother, one sister, two grandparents and himself moved successively to Denver, to a colony that failed in Mexico, and then to San Diego, California.
Education
In San Diego he was tutored at home by his mother and grandmother, but the record of his education is not clear. His daughter thinks that "he was mostly self-educated. "
Career
When his family moved to San Diego, Mantle supplemented the family income by earning $5 a week for distributing copies of the San Diegan with a horse and wagon to newsboys throughout the city. Later he was promoted to printer's apprentice at a salary of $9 a week. In 1892 his family returned to Denver and he went to work setting type by hand on the Denver Times for $25 a week. Subsequently he learned how to set type on a linotype machine that was being introduced to newspapers throughout the nation. He shifted to the composing room of the Denver Republican and then to the Denver Post, where he had his first experience as a play reviewer under peculiar circumstances. He was already an enthusiastic theatergoer and was writing drama notes directly on the type setting machine. One night when the deadline was approaching, the drama critic of the Post, Frederick W. White, handed Mantle a review in longhand.
Mantle began his professional career as a drama critic on the Denver Times in 1898. Three years later he joined the staff of the Chicago Inter-Ocean as the assistant drama critic. He began his long association with the Chicago Tribune in 1907, first as drama critic and a year and a half later as Sunday editor. But drama criticism was still the work that interested him most. When Mantle was in New York in 1911 trying to sell some Tribune features, T. E. Niles, managing editor of the New York Evening Mail, said that he did not need any features but he did need a drama critic. Mantle accepted that appointment, serving simultaneously as correspondent for the Chicago Tribune. In 1922, after Joseph Medill Patterson of the Chicago Tribune had established the Daily News in New York, he asked Mantle to become the News drama critic. Mantle continued in that post for the next twenty-three years and became a widely read, influential authority on the contemporary theater. At the time, the Daily News, the Herald Tribune, and the Times dominated New York's public taste in theatergoing. During his term Mantle established the star system of rating plays by posting stars at the top of the column. Four stars was the highest rating; plays of less than first quality were rated by fewer stars, down to one-half. Mantle died, aged 74, of stomach cancer on February 9, 1948. He is buried in Fairmont Cemetery, Denver, Colorado.
Being a friendly person who radiated cheer in the theater, he was a friendly critic. He regarded himself not as a dictator but as a theatergoer. Before the Daily News moved in 1930 into quarters easily accessible from Broadway, Mantle wrote his reviews on the type-writer of the Chicago Tribune correspondent in the syndicate room of the New York Times. A messenger from the Daily News came for the copy at about midnight, and Mantle would then take ten or fifteen minutes to compare notes and gossip with the drama staff of the Times. But when the Daily News moved, Mantle went directly to his own office. First, he would remove the padlock on his typewriter (as an old linotype operator, he did not like to have anyone else using the keyboard on which he composed), and then he would take out his father's gold watch, snap open the hunting case, and put it on his desk where he could keep track of the time. He pasted up the cast of the actors in the play and sent it to the composing room and in pencil wrote the headline, which he also sent to the composing room. With all the preliminaries out of the way, he proceeded to the writing of the review. An old newspaper man accustomed to the technique of going to press, he always conformed to the printers' schedules. He never knew the exact number of plays he reviewed, but he guessed that the number exceeded 6, 000.
He was a modest man of less than average height, with brown hair that never turned white, bright eyes, and a kindly mouth. He was inclined to self-deprecation. "Well, Mantle will give the matter his usual consideration, " he used to say puckishly when a decision had to be made. He served two terms as president of the New York Drama Critics' Circle, and he rarely missed a session of the Dutch Treat Luncheon Club. In 1940 he became the first drama critic to be elected a member of the Players, a club composed of actors and men of the theater that had always regarded critics as alien to good fellowship. His home in Forest Hills, which he bought in 1916, was not only the physical, but the spiritual, foundation of his life.
In the winter of 1948 he was admitted to a hospital in Forest Hills, N. Y. , for tests for cancer. Although the prospects of recovery were slender, he retained his sense of humor and amiability. Staring at the crucifix on the wall before his bed, he remarked, "I suppose they put that up there to remind me of how much better off I am. "
Quotes from others about the person
"Mantle is the recording angel of our contemporary theatre. " - John Mason Brown, a colleague on other publications.
"Labor of love for which Mr. Mantle will be remembered as long as the history of the American theatre remains interesting. " - Joseph Wood Krutch, former critic for the Nation.
Connections
He married Lydia Holmes Sears of Denver on August 20, 1903. Over the years their home also came to be the home of his two sisters-in-law, who were both widows, and his adopted daughter, Margaret, who was the center of the family life.