William Winter

William Winter (July 15, 1836 - June 30, 1917) was an American dramatic critic and author. He was born on July 15, 1836 in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Winter graduated from Harvard Law School in 1857. William Winter wore many literary hats during his long, illustrious career: theater critic, biographer, poet, essayist, among them. He is known for his Romantic style poetry, and for his long career as an editor and writer for some of New York City's great papers. Winter was a tour de force in the original Bohemian scene of Greenwich Village, going on to become one of the most influential men of letters of the last half of the 19th century and the pre-eminent drama critic and biographer of the times. Winter became the unofficial biographer of the Pfaff's Circle of Greenwich Village of which he was a part. The Pfaffians spawned the careers of such writers as Walt Whitman and Mark Twain. By 1854 Winter had already published a collection of verse and worked as a reviewer for the Boston Transcript; he befriended Pfaffian Thomas Bailey Aldrich after reviewing a volume of his poetry. He relocated to New York in 1856. Winter became a regular at the center of Greenwich Village's Bohemian hotspot, Pfaff's, where artists, renegades, and radical thinkers of all kinds converged. This was where Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Winslow Homer, Edwin Booth, Adah Isaacs Menken, Ada Clara, Horatio Alger Jr and an endless list of the Bohemian crowd came to mix with the journalists and radical political thinkers of the times. It was where one came to explore a new counter-culture in the Village, a salon of the Civil War era where the unconventional literati would gather-a place where no topic was off limits and all eccentricities were embraced. Winter was at the heart of this influential circle known as The Pfaffians who gathered weekly at the Vault at Pfaff's Beer Hall on Broadway and Bleeker. The Pfaff Bohemians would lay the foundation for Winter's entire life and career as both a poet and a writer. He later described some of his life as a young Pfaffian, describing the extraordinary scene and the many great minds he encountered in his biography Old Friends (1909). He also wrote introductions and brief biographies for the editions of the collected works of Pfaff's regulars like Fitz James O'Brien, John Brougham, and George Arnold.