Burns Mantle
American theatre critic (1873-1948)
Robert Burns Mantle (December 23, 1873 – February 9, 1948) was an American theater critic and screenwriter. He founded the Best Plays annual publication in 1920.
Biography
Mantle was born in Watertown, New York, on December 23, 1873, to Robert Burns Mantle and Susan Lawrence. As a child he moved to Denver, Colorado.
By 1892, he was working as a linotype machine operator in California and then became a reporter.
By the late 1890s, Mantle was working as a drama critic for the Denver Times. He later moved to Chicago, Illinois, and then New York City, New York, in 1911. He was at the New York Evening Mail until 1922, and then the Daily News until his retirement in 1943. Mantle was succeeded as the drama critic at the Daily News by his assistant John Arthur Chapman.
He died, aged 74, of stomach cancer on February 9, 1948.
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Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5000081. VIAF identifies the subject as 37139861. The Library of Congress control number is no90016059. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1873, 1948, 1920 and 1892.
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This entry incorporates text from “Burns Mantle” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.