Brooks Atkinson

Justin Brooks Atkinson (November 28, 1894 – January 14, 1984) was an American theater critic who spent nearly four decades at The New York Times, from 1922 to 1960. The paper’s own obituary described him as “the theater’s most influential reviewer of his time.” Born in Melrose, Massachusetts, to Jonathan H. Atkinson, a salesman statistician, and Garafelia Taylor, he printed his own newspaper as a boy using movable type and set his sights on journalism. He studied at Harvard University, writing for the Boston Herald while there, and graduated in 1917.

After stints at the Springfield Daily News and the Boston Evening Transcript—where he worked as an assistant to the drama critic—he joined the Times in 1922 as editor of the Book Review. By 1925 he had become the paper’s drama critic. He married writer Oriana MacIlveen in August 1926.

On the drama desk, Atkinson quickly earned a reputation for championing new forms of theater—he was an early admirer of Eugene O’Neill—and for taking an interest in all kinds of drama, including off-Broadway work. In 1928, praising the realism of The Front Page, he wrote that no one who had “ground his heels in the grime of a police headquarters press room” would complain about the play’s argot. He dropped the “J.” from his byline in 1932 and developed the witty, direct style that became his trademark. A strong supporter of the Works Progress Administration, especially the Federal Theatre Project, he traveled widely to see productions such as the Harlem “Voodoo Macbeth,” directed by a 21-year-old Orson Welles, and the collaborative historical play Lost Colony on Roanoke Island.

His reviews carried immense weight: his 1940 pan of Lawrence Riley’s Return Engagement closed the comedy after just eight performances, despite the success of Riley’s previous hit Personal Appearance. Dubbed “the conscience of the theater” for his openness to earnest experimental work and his belief that theater could educate and spark public debate, Atkinson was often uneasy about the influence he held over Broadway’s box office. After Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, he tried to enlist in the Navy but was refused.

He then requested a reassignment to war coverage, and the Times sent him to China as a war correspondent, where he covered the Second Sino-Japanese War until 1945. While there, he visited Mao Zedong in Yan’an and was captivated by him, writing favorably about the Chinese Communist Party and criticizing Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government as reactionary and corrupt. He described the Communist movement’s political system as an “agrarian or peasant democracy, or as a farm labor party,” and the Times ran his article under the headline Yenan, a Chinese Wonderland City.

After the war, Atkinson spent a brief period in New York before being sent to Moscow as a press correspondent. His work there earned him the Pulitzer Prize for Correspondence in 1947. He then returned to the Times drama desk, where he stayed until his retirement in 1960. He is widely credited with helping Off-Broadway become a major theatrical force in the 1950s, and many influential theater figures cited him as crucial to their careers.

Producer David Merrick’s famous spoof ad for Subways Are For Sleeping—which hired seven ordinary New Yorkers who shared names with prominent critics—had to wait until Atkinson retired, because there was only one Brooks Atkinson in the city. Elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1960, he came out of retirement briefly in 1965 to write a favorable review of Man of La Mancha, which appeared on the first page of the show’s original souvenir program. The Players organized a tribute dinner for his 80th birthday, attended by Arthur Miller, Elia Kazan, and other prominent actors and playwrights. He died on January 14, 1984, at Crestwood Hospital in Huntsville, Alabama, having moved there from his farm in Durham, New York, in 1981 to be closer to his family.