Denis Johnston

William Denis Johnston OBE (born June 18, 1901 in Dublin , † August 8, 1984 ) was an Irish playwright .

Life

Origin, studies and literary debut

After attending school, the son of William Johnston , a judge on the High Court and in 1939 at the Supreme Court of Ireland , studied law at the University of Cambridge and Harvard University and was admitted to the bar in England in 1925 at the Inner Temple and in Ireland .

In addition to working as a lawyer , he began his writing career in the late 1920s . His impressionistic and experimental drama Shadowdance was rejected by Lady Isabella Augusta Gregory for performance at the Abbey Theater in Dublin. Lady Gregory, which was considered very conservative wrote when Johnston submitted his piece, "The Old Lady Says No" ( The old lady says "No" ) on the front page of the manuscript . Johnson decided to rename his play and it eventually premiered as "The Old Lady Says No" at the Gate Theater in 1928 and was a huge hit with audiences.

This stage work was followed by The Moon on the Yellow River (1931) and a few other plays over the next three decades, where he himself was director of the Gate Theater between 1931 and 1936. His penchant for the grotesque was also evident in A Bride for the Unicorn (1933).

In 1936 he became an employee of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), but continued to work in literature and, for example, wrote Blind Man's Buff with Ernst Toller in 1936 .

World War II and university professor

During the Second World War he worked as a war correspondent in the Middle East and the Middle East , but also in Germany , France and Italy . For his services he was awarded the Officer's Cross of the Order of the British Empire in 1946 and he was program director for the BBC television program for several years .

In 1950 he accepted a professorship for English Language and English Literature at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts and held this teaching position for ten years until 1960.

During this time he also wrote his first autobiographical work: Nine Rivers from Jordan (1953), in which he described his war experiences. He also wrote a biography of Jonathan Swift , which appeared in 1959 under the title In Search of Swift , as well as the libretto for the opera Six People Looking for an Author (1959) by Hugo Weisgall based on the play of the same name by Luigi Pirandello .

In the 1960s and 1970s he was visiting professor at several universities in the United States . Another autobiography appeared in 1977 with A Brazen Head . Most recently, Dramatic Works of Denis Johnston (1977) and Selected Plays of Denis Johnston (1984) appeared.

His daughter is the novelist Jennifer Johnston .

literature

Chamber's Biographical Dictionary , Edinburgh 2002, ISBN 0-550-10051-2 , p. 811
Meyers Großes Personenlexikon , Mannheim 1968, p. 698
J. Ronsley: Denis Johnston, a Retrospective , 1981
Rory Johnston: Orders and Desecrations: Life of the Playwright Denis Johnston , 1992, ISBN 0946640637

Web links

personal data
SURNAME	Johnston, Denis
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Johnston, William Denis (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	Irish playwright and writer
DATE OF BIRTH	June 18, 1901
PLACE OF BIRTH	Dublin
DATE OF DEATH	August 8, 1984