William Dunlap's energetic though financially fruitless career as a painter, playwright, theater manager, biographer, and historian in the early decades of the American Republic won him recognition as "The Father of the American Theater" and "the American Vasari." Without genius as a painter or dramatist, he strove within his limits to define and achieve professional ideals for the arts and the stage in his still-provincial country. His exhaustive efforts--more antiquarian than theoretically critical--to record the experiences of his countrymen in his A History of the American Theatre (1832) and his History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States (1834), together with what has survived of his diary, published as Diary of William Dunlap ... (1930), provide basic materials upon which modern understanding of the period depends.

For forty years Dunlap kept his eye clearly focused on the rise and progress of the arts in the...