Burns Mantle

Biography

The boy who began life in 1873 as Robert Burns Mantle in Watertown, New York, slipped away from his quiet hometown the moment schooling ended, chasing horizon lines westward. Fate rerouted him in 1892: a planned detour to Chicago’s Columbian Exposition stalled in Denver when the Denver Times handed him a press pass and a column. For two seasons—1898 to 1900—he learned the job by lantern light, then traded one Rocky Mountain newsroom for another, critiquing curtain calls at the Denver Republican until 1901. Chicago summoned next. The Inter Ocean kept him busy dissecting Midwest melodramas until 1907; a single-year breather followed before the Chicago Tribune claimed him as both dramatic and Sunday editor, posts he held from 1908 to 1911. The glow of Broadway finally lured him east: first to the Evening Mail’s desk (until 1922), then to the New York Daily News, where the byline “Burns Mantle” became the paper’s theatrical compass for the rest of his career. Between deadlines he anthologized the American stage—compiling yearbooks that distilled each season into ten indispensable plays. By 1947 those slim volumes had earned him a special Tony Award; peers already called him the dean of Manhattan’s aisle-watchers. The footlights dimmed for him a year later, in 1948, in Forest Hills, Queens, but the annual “Best Plays” series—his living anthology—keeps his verdicts alive in every library where drama still matters.