author
Clayton Meeker Hamilton
1881–1946
A sharp-eyed American drama critic, playwright, and teacher, he helped explain theater and fiction to a wide audience in the early 20th century. His books on dramatic criticism and the craft of writing made literary ideas feel clear, practical, and alive.
3 Audiobooks
The Theory of the Theatre, and Other Principles of Dramatic Criticism
by Clayton Meeker Hamilton
Materials and Methods of Fiction With an Introduction by Brander Matthews
by Clayton Meeker Hamilton
A Manual of the Art of Fiction
by Clayton Meeker Hamilton
About the author
Born in Brooklyn in 1881, Clayton Meeker Hamilton became known as an American drama critic, lecturer, and playwright. He studied at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn and then earned a master's degree from Columbia University, where he also taught early in his career.
Hamilton wrote criticism and edited for several New York publications, and he built a reputation as a lively interpreter of theater and literature. He also wrote plays and later worked with movie studios in the 1920s, showing how comfortably he moved between criticism and popular entertainment.
Readers still encounter him through books such as The Theory of the Theatre, Materials and Methods of Fiction, and A Manual of the Art of Fiction. Those works reflect his gift for making the structure of stories and stagecraft accessible to general readers as well as students of writing and drama.