Author: Hutton, Joseph
Biography:
Hutton, Joseph (1787-1828: Kettell)
He was a native of Philadelphia, but the reliable records do not name his parents. He had some schooling, then went to work in a store and started contributing poetry to periodicals. His first independent publications were romances. He wrote his first work for the theatre in 1808 and continued to produce comedies, afterpieces, and melodramas well into the 1820s. He established a school in order to support a wife and daughter (their names are not known): the New American Reader that he edited in 1813 was a byproduct of that work. In 1822 he took to the stage as an actor himself, performing in Philadelphia and then in "southern and western states" (Kettell). In 1823 the Huttons moved to Newbern NC, where again he taught school and wrote two more plays, a farce and a tragedy, both of which remained unpublished. (Kettell; Oxford Companion to American Theatre [3rd edn. 2004])