Maurice Browne

Maurice Browne (12 February 1881 – 21 January 1955) was an English-born poet, actor, theatre director, and book writer whose career spanned both the United States and the United Kingdom. Born in Reading, England, he was the son of the Reverend Frederick Herbert Browne, a Wadham College, Oxford graduate who served as head of Ipswich School, and Frances Anne Neligan, daughter of the Reverend Maurice Neligan D.D. His father died by suicide in 1894, leaving four children; Frances subsequently relocated to Eastbourne to operate a school, and Maurice enrolled at Eastbourne College. He later won a scholarship to Peterhouse, Cambridge, though before matriculating in Michaelmas Term 1900 he served in the British Army and spent time in South Africa during the Second Anglo-Boer War. He graduated with a B.A. in 1903.

During his time at Cambridge, Browne formed a friendship with Louis Wilkinson and belonged to a poetic circle that included Harold Monro, Guy Noel Pocock, and Herman Leonard Pass. He ceased writing poetry upon graduation. In 1904 he was teaching at St. Paul's School in Darjeeling, and after returning to London he turned to printing and publishing, focusing on verse through small press work. He co-ran the Samurai Press from 1907 to 1909 with Harold Monro — whose name referenced H. G. Wells's A Modern Utopia — the same Monro who had married Browne's sister Dorothy in 1901. Browne encountered Ellen Van Volkenburg while traveling in Italy and traveled to Chicago to marry her in 1912. That same year, the couple adapted a space in the Fine Arts Building to establish the Chicago Little Theatre, an institution for which Browne and Van Volkenburg have been credited as founders of the Little Theatre Movement in America. They operated the theatre for five years before going on to found the department of drama at the Cornish School in Seattle in 1918. In 1921, Browne and Van Volkenburg performed together in a production of George Bernard Shaw's The Philanderer at the Cornish School playhouse.

Browne's Broadway career extended from 1922 to 1931 and encompassed work as both a performer and a book writer. His Broadway credits include the play Wings Over Europe, The Unknown Warrior, and Faust. Outside of Broadway, his work at the Theatre of the Golden Bough included the 1924 production of his own play The Mother of Gregory, in which Van Volkenburg took the title role across performances on June 6, 7, and 14 of that year. His most celebrated achievement as a producer came in 1929 with the London staging of Journey's End, written by R. C. Sherriff, a production that proved both critically and financially successful. The profits enabled Browne to acquire stakes in both the Globe Theatre and the Queen's Theatre in London's West End.

Browne died on 21 January 1955 in Torquay, England.