page_title: Paul Kester
section_title: Life and career
hierarchical_section_title: Paul Kester / Life and career
caption_attribution_description: English: Graves of Paul Kester and his mother, Pohick Church Cemetery, Fairfax County, Virginia
context_page_description: Paul Kester was an American playwright and novelist. He was the younger brother of journalist Vaughan Kester and a cousin of the literary editor and critic William Dean Howells.
context_section_description: Kester was born in 1870, some 30 miles north of Columbus at Delaware, Ohio. He was the younger of two sons raised by Franklin "Frank" Cooley and Harriet (née Watkins) Kester. His father was traveling salesman, and mother an art teacher who in 1882 helped and found the Cleveland School of Art. Kester was educated by home tutors and at private schools where he excelled in the dramatic arts.
  His first success came in January 1892 with Countess Roudine, which premiered in Philadelphia at the Chestnut Street Theatre and opened a week later at the Union Square Theatre in New York City. Countess Roudine was a collaborative effort written with the actress Minnie Maddern Fiske.
  In 1896 his adaptation of Edward Bulwer-Lytton's Eugene Aram was produced by  Walker Whiteside's company and in 1902 with George Middleton adapted the George W. Cable Southern romance The Cavalier that was staged at the Criterion Theatre with Julia Marlowe. Actress Annie Russell produced and starred in his 1906 Quaker tale Friend Hannah, written with the help of his brother, Vaughan.
  Kester worked on nearly 30 plays over his career. His most successful Broadway effort was probably The Woman of Bronze, which ran for 252 performances between September 1920 and April 1921 at Manhattan's Frazee Theatre. He also authored a number of books, with His Own Country (1917) most likely the more popular.
  Described as shy and diffident, Kester preferred country life to that of the city. In 1902, with his brother, he purchased and renovated Woodlawn Plantation in Northern Virginia. Five years later the two acquired nearby Gunston Hall, where Vaughan Kester died in 1911. A few years later Kester and his mother relocated to Belmont, an estate near Alexandria, Virginia, which is today part of the campus of St. Stephen's & St. Agnes School.
  Kester spent his final years at Lake Mohegan, a small community near Peekskill, New York. He died there in 1933 at the age of 62, a victim of thrombosis. At the time the closest surviving member of his family was the mezzo-soprano opera singer Florence Wickham, a cousin. He is buried in the graveyard at Pohick Church, once the parish church of Gunston Hall, as is his mother; at one time he had as a member of the church vestry.
caption: Graves of Paul Kester and his mother at Pohick Church in Fairfax County, Virginia. The writer's grave is on the right; his mother's is on the left.
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