SOURCE: Krutch, Joseph Wood. “George Henry Boker.” Sewanee Review 25, no. 4 (October 1917): 457-68.

In the following essay, Krutch maintains that Boker deserves a far more prominent place in the history of American drama than is generally accorded him.

When the history of the American drama comes to be written, there will emerge from obscurity no man of more interest to the general reader than the Philadephian, George Henry Boker; for although he exerted little influence on his contemporaries his plays especially possess a real intrinsic merit. In the first half of the nineteenth century, romantic tragedy was the type to which the best native American drama belonged, and the work of Boker represents the climax in the development of this form. In spite of this fact he has not, for some reason, attracted biographical writers, and a Philadelphia newspaper man complained that if Mr. Boker had been born in...