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    The Autobiography of a Play Papers on Play-Making, II
    The Autobiography of a Play Papers on Play-Making, II
    The Autobiography of a Play Papers on Play-Making, II
    Ebook71 pages47 minutes

    The Autobiography of a Play Papers on Play-Making, II

    By Augustus Thomas and Howard Bronson

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    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArchive Classics
    Release dateNov 27, 2013
    The Autobiography of a Play Papers on Play-Making, II

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      Book preview

      The Autobiography of a Play Papers on Play-Making, II - Augustus Thomas

      The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Autobiography of a Play, by Bronson Howard

      This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with

      almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or

      re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included

      with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

      Title: The Autobiography of a Play

      Papers on Play-Making, II

      Author: Bronson Howard

      Commentator: Augustus Thomas

      Release Date: July 6, 2006 [EBook #18769]

      Language: English

      *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A PLAY ***

      Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed

      Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This book was

      produced from scanned images of public domain material

      from the Google Print project)

      PAPERS ON PLAY-MAKING

      II

      The Autobiography of a Play

      by

      Bronson Howard

      WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY

      Augustus Thomas

      Printed for the Dramatic Museum of Columbia University

      in the City of New York

      MCMXIV

      CONTENTS

      INTRODUCTION

      The qualities that made Bronson Howard a dramatist, and then made him the first American dramatist of his day, were his human sympathy, his perception, his sense of proportion, and his construction. With his perception, his proportion, and his construction, respectively, he could have succeeded as a detective, as an artist, or as a general. It was his human sympathy, his wish and his ability to put himself in the other man's place, that made play-writing definitely attractive to him. As a soldier he would have shown the courage of the dogged defender in the trench or the calmly supervising general at headquarters, rather than the mad bravery that carried the flag at the front of a forlorn hope. His gifts were intellectual. His writing was more disciplined than inspired. If we shall claim for him genius, it must be preferably the genius of infinite pains.

      He saw intimately and clearly. His proportion made him write with discretion and a proper sense of cumulative emphasis, and his construction enabled him so to combine his materials as to secure this effect. He was intensely self-critical; and while almost without conceit concerning his own work, he had an accuracy of detached estimation that enabled him to stand by his own opinion with a proper inflexibility when his judgment convinced him that the opinion was correct.

      He worked slowly. At one time, in his active period, it was his custom to go from New York, where he lived, to New Rochelle, where he had formerly lived. There, upon the rear end of a suburban lot, he had a plain board cabin not more than ten feet square. In it were a deal table, a hard chair, and a small stove. He would go to this cabin in the morning when the tide of suburban travel was setting the other way, and spend his entire day there with his manuscript and his cigars. He carried a small lunch from his home. He once told me he was satisfied with his day's work if it provided him with ten good lines that would not have to be abandoned. I did not take that statement to imply that there were not in his experience the more profitable days that are in the work of every writer—days when the subject seems to command the pen and when the hand cannot keep pace with the vision. He was often too saturated with his story, too much the prisoner of his people, for it to have been otherwise; but his training had verified for him the truth that easy writing is hard reading.

      Then, too, while Bronson Howard arranged his characters for the eye and built his story for the judgment, he wrote his speeches for the ear. This attention to the cadence of a line was so essential to him that when writing as he sometimes did for a magazine he studied the sound

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