John Rankin Towse

Towse, J[ohn] Rankin (1854–1933), critic. Born in Streatham, England, and educated at Cambridge, he began his theatrical career as a spear‐carrier in London productions, then came to America in 1869, taking a job with the New York Evening Post. Five years later he was made the paper's drama critic, a position he held for fifty‐four years until his retirement in 1927. Like his close friend William Winter, he was an archconservative and highly pedantic. Although Towse leaned over backwards to be fair, it became clear with the passing years that he found less and less sympathy with modern theatre. On his retirement he issued a violent denunciation of what he considered the theatre's descent into immorality and cheapness. His memoirs, Sixty Years of the Theatre (1916), extolled the palmy days of Edwin Booth and the Wallacks.