Author: Payne, John Howard
Biography:
PAYNE, John Howard (1791-1852: WBIS)
He was born in New York City, the son of Sarah (Isaacs) and William Payne. When the family moved to Boston in 1799, he attended his father's school and got his first taste of journalism by contributing theatre criticism to newspapers and acting as assistant editor of The Fly, or Juvenile Miscellany. For financial reasons, however, he was apprenticed to a counting-house in New York. He made the most of his situation there by attending the theatre and starting a weekly journal, the Thespian Mirror. His first play (1806) failed and he accepted the offer of patrons to send him to Union College, where he continued his theatre-going and founded another journal. In 1809 he left college for the stage, touring the country in major tragic roles for three years and then moving on to England as "the American Roscius." In London and Paris, for the next twenty years, he had greater success as a dramatist and adapter of French plays--melodramas, comedies, interludes, etc.--than as a performer. Of his original plays, the most durable was his tragedy Brutus, written for Edmund Kean. (But the most durable of all his works was a single song in his adapted "musical drama" Clari, of 1825: "Home, Sweet Home.") He courted several women, including the widowed Mary Shelley, but never married. After returning to the US in 1832 he continued to write as before; he also became involved with the cause of Cherokee land rights. He was appointed US Consul to Tunis for two terms, 1843-5 and 1851-2; thirty years after he died there his body was exhumed and returned to the US for burial in Washington DC. His first biographer, Gabriel Harrison, who collected and published much of Payne's correspondence in 1875, revised the first edition to cover the 1883 arrival of the ship bearing his remains in Brooklyn. (ANBO 14 June 2020; Gabriel Harrison, John Howard Payne. . . Life and Writings [rev. 1885]) HJ