William Winter Biography

Born in Gloucester, Massachusetts, Winter graduated from Harvard Law School in 1857. He then chose literature as his field of endeavor, and moved to New York City (1859), where he became literary critic of the Saturday Press, then (1861-65) of the New York Albion, and for more than 40 years (1865-1909) was a drama critic of the New York Tribune. He died in New York City in 1917 and was buried at Silver Mount Cemetery.

Brooks Atkinson, in his history of the American Theater Broadway, accused Winters of being an intolerant prude for denouncing modern dramatists like Henrik Ibsen and George Bernard Shaw, and foreign stars like Sarah Bernhardt and Eleanor Duse, for their personal lives. However, Atkinson credited Winter for having a remarkable memory, wherein he left a treasure trove of written descriptions of stars like Edwin Booth and Sir Henry Irving. To this one may add that Winter had some degree of common sense that was missing from many of the dramatists of his day. His review of the ever-popular drama East Lynne showed that he considered the work a piece of claptrap, which most people these days agree is a correct assessment.[citation needed]

In 1886, in commemoration of the death of his son, he founded a library at the academy in Stapleton, New York