SOURCE: "Several Writers for the Theatre—and Miss Stein" in his Passing Judgements, Alfred A. Knopf, 1935, pp. 140-76.
Nathan has been called the most learned and influential drama critic the United States has yet produced. During the early decades of the twentieth century, he was greatly responsible for shifting the emphasis of the American theatre from light entertainment to serious drama and for introducing audiences and producers to the work of Eugene O'Neill, Henrik Ibsen, and Bernard Shaw, among others. Nathan was a contributing editor to H. L. Mencken's magazine the American Mercury and coeditor of the Smart Set. With Mencken, Nathan belonged to an iconoclastic school of American critics who attacked the vulgarity of accepted ideas and sought to bring a new level of sophistication to American culture, which they found provincial and backward. Nathan shared with Mencken a gift for stinging invective and verbal adroitness, as well as total confidence in his own judgements. In the following excerpt, Nathan asserts that Wallace's work, while popular, was vulgar and insignificant.
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