Winter, William

Winter, William, 1836–1917, American drama critic, biographer, and poet, b. Gloucester, Mass., grad. Harvard Law School, 1857. A member of the literary bohemians who met in Pfaff's Cellar in New York City in the 1850s, he summed up his memories of them—Bayard Taylor, Walt Whitman, and others—in Old Friends (1909). As drama critic for the New York Tribune (1865–1909), Winter vigorously opposed the advent of dramatic realism. His many studies of theatrical personalities and his Other Days (1908) and The Wallet of Time (1913), theatrical reminiscences, are useful histories of the period. Winter's poetry was collected in 1909.