John Luther Long

John Luther Long (January 1, 1861 – October 31, 1927) was an American lawyer and writer best known for his short story "Madame Butterfly", which was based on the recollections of his sister, Jennie Correll, who had been to Japan with her husband—a Methodist missionary.^[1]

Biography

Born in Hanover, Pennsylvania, Long had been admitted to the bar in Philadelphia on October 29, 1881, and become a practicing lawyer. On January 17, 1882, he married Mary Jane Sprenkle. He died at age 66 on October 31, 1927, having spent the last two months of his life at a sanatorium in Clifton Springs, New York. The obituary in The New York Times of November 1, 1927, quoted his own interpretation of himself as "a sentimentalist, and a feminist and proud of it".^[2]

With David Belasco he wrote the four act play Adrea which starred Mrs. Leslie Carter and which ran for 123 performances at the first Belasco Theatre.^[3] His one act play Dolce was staged at the Manhattan Theater on April 24, 1906, starring Minnie Maddern Fiske.^[4]

Legacy

The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center has an extensive collection of his papers including correspondence and literary projects.^[1]

Plays

• Andrea, written with David Belasco
• Dolce, a one act play
• Kassa^[5]
• The Darling of the Gods and Andrea

References

External links

• John Luther Long Papers at the Harry Ransom Center
• Works by or about John Luther Long at Wikisource
• Works by John Luther Long at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about John Luther Long at Internet Archive
• Works by John Luther Long at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
• Madame Butterfly, The Century Volume 55 Issue 3 (Jan 1898) pp. 374–393
• Madame Butterfly 1903 Grosset and Dunlap "Japanese Edition" with photogravure illustrations by C. Yarnall Abbott (1870–1938)
• David Belasco's Play Madame Butterfly, A Tragedy of Japan (from "Six Plays" Little, Brown 1928)
• John Luther Long, American Studies at The University of Virginia.