William Winter

Winter, William (1836–1917), critic. The most influential and widely read theatre critic of his era, he was born in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and educated at Harvard. He came to New York in 1859 to become literary editor of The Saturday Press, then served as drama critic for the Albion. In 1865 he was appointed the Tribune's critic, a post he held until his retirement in 1909, after which he contributed articles to various magazines. His early criticism was learned, basically sound, and open‐minded, but with the rise of realism in the 1880s he became increasingly unaccepting of new theatrical movements and was the often shrill leader of the anti‐Ibsenites. Winter came to conclude that morality was all‐important, and that no play, however meritorious, was worthy of patronage if it violated his rigid canons of right and wrong. He wrote numerous books on theatre, including Other Days (1908), Old Friends (1909), and The Wallet of Time (1913), as well as biographies of David Belasco, Edwin Booth, Joseph Jefferson, Richard Mansfield, and Ada Rehan. His penchant for composing memorial odes to dead actors earned him the nickname “Weeping Willie.” Typical both of his style and of his later, crotchety views were his comments in his Mansfield biography, “The Ibsen movement . . . impressed me, from the beginning, as unhealthful and injurious. The province of art, and especially of dramatic art, is beauty, not deformity; the need of the world is to be cheered, not depressed; and the author who avows, as Ibsen did, that he goes down into the sewers,—whatever be the purpose of his descent into those insalubrious regions,—should be left to the enjoyment of them.”

William Winter may refer to:

• William Winter (author) (1836–1917), American drama critic and author
• William Winter (chess player) (1898–1955), British chess player
• William Winter (politician) (b. 1923), Governor of Mississippi (1980–1984)
• William Winter (Royal Navy officer) (died 1589), English admiral
• William Winter (physician) (b. 1972), Sleep specialist and neurologist
• William "Bill" Richard Winter (born c.1940), American football player
• Bill Winter (born 1964), American lawyer, Assistant District Attorney in Denver, Colorado

See also

• William Winter Payne

This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the same personal name. If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article.

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)