Ridgely Torrence

Frederic Ridgely Torrence (Nov. 27, 1874 Xenia, Ohio - Dec. 25, 1950 New York City) was an American poet, and editor.

Torrence was the son of Findley David Torrence and Mary Ridgely Torrence. He attended Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, and Princeton University.

In the late 1890s he settled in Greenwich Village, in New York City, working as a librarian and becoming part of a circle of poets that included E. A. Robinson, William Vaughn Moody, and Robert Frost.Edmund Clarence Stedman helped him revise The House of a Hundred Lights.

He was the fiction editor at Cosmopolitan magazine, from 1905 to 1907.

The verse plays, showing the influence of John Millington Synge, showed realistic portrayals of African Americans, and a revolt against their station in society.

In 1914, he married author Olivia Howard Dunbar.

Torrence's collection of plays, Three Plays for a Negro Theater premiered in 1917, as a production of the Negro Players.

He was poetry editor of The New Republic (1920–33), mentoring Louise Bogan. He organized the National Survey of the Negro Theater (1939), for the Rockefeller Foundation.

His papers are held at Princeton.

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