William Thompson Price, dramatic critic, creator of playwrights, was
born near Louisville, Kentucky, December 17, 1846. He was educated in
the private schools of Louisville, but the Civil War proved more
interesting than text-books, so he ran away with Colonel E. P. Clay,
whom he left, in turn, for John H. Morgan, and Generals Forrest and
Wheeler. He was finally captured and imprisoned but he, of course,
escaped. After the war Mr. Price went to Germany and studied for three
years at the Universities of Leipzig and Berlin. From 1875 to 1880 he
was dramatic critic for the Louisville _Courier-Journal_; and the
following five years he devoted to editorial work for various
newspapers, and to collecting material for his enormous biography of
the Rev. George O. Barnes, a noted and eccentric Kentucky evangelist,
which appeared under the title of _Without Scrip or Purse_
(Louisville, 1883). Mr. Price went to New York in the early eighties,
and that city has remained his home to this day. In 1885 he was
dramatic critic for the now defunct New York _Star_, which he left
after a year to become a reader of new plays for A. M. Palmer, the
leading manager of his time, whom he was associated with for more than
twenty years. Mr. Price's _The Technique of the Drama_ (New York,
1892), gave him a high position among the dramatic writers of the
country. A new edition of it was called for in 1911, and it seems
destined to remain the chief authority in its field for many years. In
1901 Mr. Price became playreader for Harrison Grey Fiske; and in the
same year he founded the American School of Playwriting, in which men
and women, whom the gods forgot, are transformed into great
dramatists--perhaps! His second volume upon the stage, _The Analysis
of Play Construction and Dramatic Principle_ (New York, 1908), is the
text-book of his school. At the present time Mr. Price is editor of
_The American Playwright_, a monthly magazine of dramatic discussion.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Letters from Mr. Price to the present writer; _Who's
Who in America_ (1912-1913).