William Evans Burton's reputation as a magazine writer, editor, and publisher has been overshadowed by his great success as an actor, playwright, and theater manager, and by his notoriously stormy relationship with Edgar Allan Poe, who was for a year his coeditor on the Gentleman's Magazine. Scholars interested in American literature and journalism in that period judge his talents to have been minor.

William Burton was born in London on 24 September 1804. His father, William George Burton, was a printer with some literary pretensions, having had one significant religious work published. He believed his son was destined for the church and provided him a classical education at St. Paul's School. However, the senior Burton died when William was only eighteen, and the boy had to withdraw from school to take over his father's print shop. He aspired to be an author and publisher and tried vainly at this early...