# William Winter (author)

William Winter (July 15, 1836 – June 30, 1917) was an American drama critic, journalist, essayist, poet, and author. Beginning in the 1850s, he built a literary career in New York City, where he became known for his association with the Bohemian movement.

## Biography

Winter was born on July 15, 1836, in Gloucester, Massachusetts. He graduated from Harvard Law School in 1857.
Known for his Romantic poetry, he immersed himself in writing theater criticism, essays, and brief biographies. By 1854, Winter had published a collection of verse and worked as a reviewer for the Boston Transcript. He relocated to New York in 1856 and became the assistant editor of literary and social commentary weekly for The Saturday Press, in print intermittently from 1858 to 1866. He also worked as a drama critic for the New York Tribune.
Winter became a regular at the center of Greenwich Village's Bohemian hotspot, Pfaff's, among writers and artists, such as Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Winslow Homer, Edwin Booth, Adah Isaacs Menken, Ada Clare, and Horatio Alger Jr.
In 1860, Winter married Scottish poet and novelist Elizabeth Campbell, raising their five children in Staten Island, New York.
In the 1880s, he began publishing biographies of thespians like the Jefferson family and Edwin Booth.
Winter opposed the modernist theater of playwrights like Ibsen and maintained that drama should be a moral force. He was particularly critical of the psychological realism and social critiques present in Ibsen's plays. He saw them as a departure from the idealized and morally instructive nature of traditional drama. His 1912 book The Wallet of Time offers a retrospective look at the development of nineteenth-century theater; in the preface, he states that "[a] ruling purpose of my criticism has been... to oppose, denounce, and endeavor to defeat the policy which, in unscrupulous greed of gain, allows the Theatre to become an instrument to vitiate public taste and corrupt public morals" (xxiv).
Winter's work on New York's theatrical scene details the careers, pursuits, and tastes of the major players and plays. He encouraged actors and writers to acknowledge the "use of a power manifestly greater in modern society than it ever was before in the history of civilization... and, if possible, to exert a beneficial influence on the mind of the rising generation, — the generation that will support the Drama, determine its spirit, and shape its destiny."
He died in New Brighton, Staten Island, on June 30, 1917, at 80 years of age, after a bout of angina pectoris. He was buried in the Silver Mount Cemetery.
Winter left two archives of biographies and essays on stars like Edwin Booth and Sir Henry Irving, in addition to career papers documenting his work as a writer and critic. Part of his archive was purchased by theater, film producer, and collector Messmore Kendall, who donated his collection of William Winter's papers and books along with Harry Houdini's archive to the University of Texas at Austin, where it is now available for research at the Harry Ransom Center.
His legacy is preserved at the Folger Shakespeare Library's Robert Young Collection on William Winter.
In 1886, in commemoration of the death of his son, he founded a library at Staten Island Academy in Stapleton, New York.

## Works

His writings include:
* The Convent, and other Poems (Boston, 1854)
* The Queen's Domain, and other Poems (1858)
* My Witness: a Book of Verse (1871)
* Sketch of the Life of Edwin Booth (1871)
* Thistledown: a Book of Lyrics (1878)
* The Trip to England (1879)
* Poems: Complete Edition (1881)
* The Jeffersons (1881)
* English Rambles and other Fugitive Pieces (Boston, 1884)
* Henry Irving (1885)
* The Stage Life of Mary Anderson (1886)
* Shakespeare's England (1888)
* Brief Chronicles (1889)
* Gray Days and Gold (1889)
* Old Shrines and Ivy (1892)
* Wanders, the Poems of William Winters (1892)
* Shadows of the Stage (1892, 1893, and 1894)
* The Life and art of Edwin Booth (1893)
* The Life and Art of Joseph Jefferson (1894)
* Brown Heath and Blue Bells (1896)
* Ada Rehan (1898)
* Other Days of the Stage (1908)
* Old Friends (1909)
* Poems (1909), definitive author's edition
* Life and Art of Richard Mansfield (1910)
* The Wallet of Time (1913)
* a Life of Tyrone Power (1913)
* Shakespeare on the Stage (two series, 1911–1915)
* Vagrant Memories (1915)
He has edited, with memoirs and notes:
* The Poems of George Arnold (Boston, 1866)
* Life, Stories, and Poems of John Brougham (1881)
* The Poems and Stories of Fitz-James O'Brien (1881)