Thomas

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Title

Thomas

Description

American author and poet, Frederick William Thomas was born October 26, 1806 in Providence, Rhode Island. He spent his early years in Charleston, South Carolina. He attended law school in Baltimore, Maryland where in 1828 he was admitted to the bar. In 1830 he moved to Cincinnati and assisted his father in editing the Commercial Daily Advertiser. He became an associate editor of the Democratic Intelligencer in 1834, and of the Evening Post in 1835. He traveled extensively through the southern states, was a successful lecturer, and occasionally took part in politics. He maintained a correspondence with Edgar Allen Poe, having first met him in Philadelphia in 1840, and became his closest confidante.
Thomas’s novels represent his greatest literary achievement. His first novel, Clinton Bradshaw; or The Adventures of a Lawyer (1835) is an Americanization of the British novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton's Pelham (1828) about upper-class life mixed with crime scenes. It features a courtroom scene that would set a standard for later fictional depictions. Thomas's second novel, East and West (1836), relocates elements of the popular English novel to the American setting of western Pennsylvania and foreshadows the great potential of the American west. His third effort, Howard Pinkney (1840), is regarded as Thomas's greatest novel and is noteworthy as an early attempt to incorporate a detective story into an American novel. Another novel of note is The Beechen Tree, a Tale told in Rhyme, and other Poems (1844). An archive of Frederick William Thomas's papers is part of the Griswold Collection at the Boston Public Library, Massachusetts. Frederick William Thomas died on August 27, 1866 in Washington, D.C.

August Thomas was born on January 8, 1857 in St. Louis, Missouri. Famous as a leading American playwright during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Thomas was recognized for using native subjects rooted in regional American settings and for transforming the melodrama of action and plot into a drama of character and theme. Nevertheless, because of the changes in the theater created by post-war modernism, his reputation and his fame sharply declined in his later years, and, since his death in 1934, his plays have been all but forgotten.
His insistent focus on American themes was evident from Alabama (1891), his first success, which deals with the reconciliation of an old Confederate and his nationalistic son. Subsequently Mizzoura (1893), Arizona (1900) and Copperhead (1918) revealed Thomas's talent for constructing compelling American characters and drawing distinctly American locales. Thomas was also interested in topical themes, evident in The Witching Hour (1907), a study of the occult, and As a Man Thinks (1911), an examination of hypnotism. He also wrote comedies, the best being The Earl of Pawtucket (1903). In all, he wrote and adapted some 70 plays noted for use of native material.
Thomas served for many years as president of the Society of American Dramatists. In 1889, he was elected to The Lambs theatrical club of New York, one of America’s oldest theatrical organizations and served as its president from 1907 to 1910. In 1914 he was awarded a gold medal by the American Academy of Arts and Letters for his contribution to the theater and for improving the craft of American drama. He was awarded honorary degrees by Williams College (1914) and by Columbia College (1921). He died in 1934 and is buried in Bellefontaine Cemetery in St. Louis.

The Anglo-Welsh poet and essayist, Philip Edward Thomas was born on March 3, 1878 in Lambeth, Surrey, England and was educated at Battersea Grammar School, St. Paul’s School in London and Lincoln College at Oxford. Thomas, along with this wife, Helen and their young family of three, were living in Steep, East Hampshire at the outbreak of the First World War. In July 1915, Thomas enlisted in the British Army Reserve regiment, the Artists’ Rifles, and was killed by a shell-blast at age 39 during the Battle of Arras in 1917. He is buried in the military cemetery at Agny, France.
When he enlisted, Thomas was already an established author, literary critic and journalist; much of his work was inspired by rural England, as in The South Country (1909). In 1914, encouraged by his friend Robert Frost, he dedicated himself to write poetry and wrote his poetry under the pseudonym Edward Eastaway. His war poems, including “In Memoriam” (1915), were published and widely acclaimed after his death. In just two years, he wrote over 140 poems; written during wartime, while serving as a soldier, much of his poetry blends and shifts between meditative recollections of his beloved countryside and his experience in battle. Thomas’s poems continue to be cited in the works of writers; Graham Greene, Ian McEwan, J. M. Coetzee and children’s author Linda Newberry are among those admiring this war poet’s work. On November 11, 1985, Thomas was among 16 Great War poets commemorated on a slate stone unveiled in Westminster Abbey’s Poets’ Corner. The inscription written by fellow poet Wilfred Owen, reads: “My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.” Six portraits of Edward Thomas hang at the National Portrait Gallery in London.

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Citation

“Thomas,” Pages of Weston History: 100 Years and Beyond, accessed March 28, 2024, http://omeka.tplcs.ca/omeka_weston/items/show/1251.