America's First Hamlet (Classic Reprint) - Softcover

Grace Overmyer

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0332241092 ISBN 13: 9780332241098

Publisher: Forgotten Books, 2018

Synopsis

Excerpt from America's First Hamlet

John howard payne was an able and many-sided man, a very unusual and engaging personality, a famous figure of his time. Outstandingly he was a pioneer in the theater, probably a more active and important one than any other American of his period. Yet today he is remembered solely for the authorship of Home, Sweet Home, and the man is little more than a legend - one which begins and ends with the familiar hearsay that the home song's au thor never had a home.

This is a legend that has lent itself to much elaboration. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, when the generation of Payne's contemporaries was no longer alive, the sentimentalists got to work picturing him as they felt the author of Home, Sweet Home must have been. They made him a solitary wanderer gazing longingly into cheerfully lighted windows; they made him a street beggar standing humbly, hat in hand, while a gay throng passed him by; or they placed him m bucolic surroundings with a vine-clad cottage in the background. Whatever the setting, they managed to convert him into a saint, complete in everything but halo, and they often decorated their printed effusions with borders of flowers and birds and other innocent and lovely things.

Actually, Payne was a man of broad experience and of diverse undertakings and achievements. He was an actor, a playwright, a minor poet, an original if unstable editor, a champion of the rights of the American Indian, and a United States consular official.

About the Publisher

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This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Edition details

• Publisher: Forgotten Books
• Publication date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0332241092
• ISBN 13: 9780332241098
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 437