George Henry Jessop (1852 – 21 March 1915) was an Irish playwright, librettist, journalist, and novelist.[1] Born in Ireland and educated at Trinity College Dublin, Jessop began his career as a writer working for magazines in London before moving to California in 1873.[n 1] There he worked as both a journalist and newspaper editor for five years before beginning a career as a playwright in the United States. His first play, A Gentleman from Nevada (1879), was a success and had a profitable run at Broadway's Fifth Avenue Theatre. This work was eclipsed by his third play, Sam'l of Posen; or, The Commercial Drummer (1881), which brought both fame and fortune to its star, the actor M. B. Curtis, who purchased the rights to the work outright from Jessop. It was notably the first play in the history of American theatre to present a positive portrayal of a Jewish character.
In 1882 Jessop began a prolific partnership with the dramatist William Gill with whom he co-authored several successful stage works; many of which were performed on Broadway, including In Paradise (1882), Facts, or His Little Hatchet (1883), A Bottle of Ink (1884), and Mam’zelle, or the Little Milliner (1885). Ultimately their partnership dissolved after co-authoring a string of flops that included Muddles (1885), Bluff (1885), and Aphrodite Still in the Ring (1886). In 1887 their relationship soured and the pair parted on poor terms.
Following the collapse of his partnership with Gill, Jessop continued to co-author plays with the playwrights Brander Matthews and Augustus Pitou in addition to authoring the plays Myles Aroon (1888) and Mavourneen (1891) on his own. With Matthews he also co-authored the novel A Tale of Twenty-five Hours (1892), and alone he wrote two novels about Irish-American life: the semi-autobiographical novel Gerald Ffrench's Friends (originally published as a serialized novel in The Century Magazine in 1888 and 1889) and the mystery novel Judge Lynch: A Romance of the California Vineyards (1889). In the early 1890s he returned to Ireland before ultimately settling in London where he remained until his death in 1915. His later career as a writer in Europe was not prolific and was limited to the opera libretti for Charles Villiers Stanford's Shamus O'Brien (c. 1894) and Sidney Jones's My Lady Molly (1902), and two romance novels set in Ireland: Desmond O'Connor: the Romance of an Irish Soldier (originally published as a serialized novel in Munsey's Magazine in 1908; published as a book in 1914) and Where the Shamrock Grows: The Fortunes and Misfortunes of an Irish Family (1911).
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