George Jean Nathan

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George Jean Nathan (born February 14, 1882 in Fort Wayne, Indiana - died April 8, 1958 in New York, New York) was an American drama critic and editor.

Nathan graduated from Cornell University in 1904, where he was a member of the Quill and Dagger society.

Noted for the erudition and cynicism of his reviews, Nathan was an early champion of Eugene O'Neill. Together with H.L. Mencken, he co-founded the magazines The Smart Set in 1914 and The American Mercury in 1924. He was also a founder and an editor (1932–35) of the American Spectator, and after 1943 he wrote a syndicated column for the New York Journal-American.

Over the years, Nathan's criticisms were published in Mr. George Jean Nathan Presents (1917), The Critic and the Drama (1922), The Testament of a Critic (1931), Since Ibsen (1933), The World of George Jean Nathan (1952), and The Magic Mirror (1960). Nathan's philosophy of criticism is laid out in Autobiography of an Attitude (1925).

Nathan had a reputation as a "ladies man." (He published his paean to The Bachelor Life in 1941.) His most famous romance was with actress Lillian Gish. Their relationship began in the late 1920s and lasted almost a decade, with Gish repeatedly refusing his marriage proposals. Nathan eventually married considerably younger stage actress Julie Haydon in 1955.

Nathan allegedly was the model for the critic Addison De Witt in the film All About Eve.

The highest honor in dramatic criticism, the George Jean Nathan Award, is named after him.

"One does not go to the theater to see life and nature; one goes to see the particular way in which life and nature happen to look to a cultivated, imaginative and entertaining man who happens, in turn, to be a playwright." -George Jean Nathan^[1]