Publisher's 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 ?owers 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.
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