Sidney Howard

Early life

Howard was born in Oakland, California, the son of Helen Louise (née Coe) and John L. Howard. John was the councilman of Oakland and the President of several companies, including the Western Fuel Company, which succeeded the Hudson's Bay Company. Helen was a professional organist and piano teacher. Howard's paternal grandfather emigrated from Antrim, Ireland, in 1848, settling in Philadelphia. Howard's father and maternal grandfather helped open up the Pacific Northwest and Alaska to the shipping trade. Helen was the granddaughter of Nathaniel Coe. They are descended from Robert Coe, a 17th-century colonist who migrated to America from England.

Howard graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1915 and went on to Harvard University to study playwriting under George Pierce Baker in his legendary "47 workshop." (Other alumni of Baker's class included Eugene O'Neill, Thomas Wolfe, Philip Barry and S. N. Behrman. Howard became good friends with Behrman.)

Along with other students of Harvard professor A. Piatt Andrew, Howard volunteered with Andrew's American Field Service, serving in France and the Balkans during World War I. After the war, Howard made use of his proficiency at foreign languages and translated a number of literary works from French, Spanish, Hungarian, and German. A liberal intellectual whose politics became progressively more left-wing over the years, he also wrote articles about labor issues for The New Republic and served as literary editor for the original Life Magazine.

Career

In 1921, Howard's first play was produced on Broadway. A neo-romantic verse drama set in the time of Dante, Swords, did not do well with audiences or critics. It was with his realistic romance They Knew What They Wanted three years later that Howard established his reputation as a serious writer. The story of a middle-aged Italian vineyard owner who woos a young woman by mail with a false snapshot of himself, marries her, and then forgives her when she becomes pregnant by one of his farm hands, the play was praised for its un-melodramatic view of adultery and its tolerant approach to its characters. Theater critic Brooks Atkinson called it "a tender, original, merciful drama." They Knew What They Wanted won the 1925 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, was adapted three times into film (1928, 1930, and 1940) and later became the Broadway musical, The Most Happy Fella.

Howard's career was anything but consistent. For every successful play he wrote, he saw several others close without making any money. His saving grace was that he was a remarkably prolific writer. Lucky Sam McCarver, his next play, was an unsentimental account of the marriage of a New York speakeasy owner on his way up in the world with a self-destructive socialite on her way down. It failed to attract audiences, though it won the admiration of some reviewers.

With 1926's The Silver Cord, starring Laura Hope Crews, Howard had a major hit. This drama about a mother who is pathologically close to her sons and works to undermine their romances, the result of a decade fascinated with Freud, Oedipal complexes, and family dysfunction. Both Howard's works The Silver Cord and Ned McCobb's Daughter ran on alternate weeks in the 1926–1927 season, produced by the Theatre Guild. The Silver Cord is also the only original play by Howard to outlive its era. (His 1929 adaptation S.S. Tenacity is periodically revived.) The play was occasionally staged by regional theater companies through the late twentieth century, and its first off-Broadway production was mounted in 2013. The 1933 film of the play starred Irene Dunne and Joel McCrea, with Laura Hope Crews reprising her stage role.

By 1930, Howard was "one of the most dashing figures on the Broadway scene." A prolific writer and a founding member of the Playwrights' Company (with Maxwell Anderson, S. N. Behrman, Elmer Rice, Robert Sherwood, and John F. Wharton) he ultimately wrote or adapted more than seventy plays; a consummate theater professional, he also directed and produced a number of works.

Personal life

Three years after their separation, Clare Eames died unexpectedly in 1930. She was the niece of opera singer Emma Eames on her father's side, and of the inventor Hiram Percy Maxim on her mother's side, and a granddaughter of former Maryland governor William Thomas Hamilton. Howard and Eames had one child, a daughter, Jennifer Howard (1925–1993), who became an actress.

The following year in 1931, Howard married Leopoldine "Polly" Damrosch, youngest daughter of American conductor and composer Walter Damrosch. The couple had a son, Walter Damrosch Howard, and two daughters, Lady Sidney Howard Urquhart, and Margaret Howard.

His first daughter, Jennifer, married Samuel Goldwyn Jr. in 1950, with whom she had three sons: business executive Francis Goldwyn, actor Tony Goldwyn, and studio executive John Goldwyn.

Death

Howard died in the summer of 1939 at the age of 48 in Tyringham, Massachusetts while working on his 700-acre farm. A lover of the quiet rural life, Howard spent as much time on his farm as possible when he was not in New York or Hollywood. He was crushed to death in a garage by his two-and-a-half ton tractor. He had turned the ignition switch on and was cranking the engine to start it when it lurched forward, pinning him against the wall of the garage. "His death was a Broadway calamity," Atkinson wrote. "Broadway and the Playwrights' Company lost one of its most admirable people...in the midst of an active career and full of ideas for more plays." In his 2007 history of Broadway playwrights, Ethan Mordden wrote, "When he found his metier, Howard excelled at edgy American stories about charismatic but somewhat unlikable people. He seemed to enjoy testing his public; or perhaps he simply saw the world as being filled with rogues..."

At the time of his death, Howard was working on a dramatization of Carl van Doren's biography of Benjamin Franklin. He is buried in the Tyringham Cemetery.

Legacy

Howard left behind a number of unproduced works. Lute Song, an adaptation of an old Chinese play co-written with Will Irwin, premiered on Broadway in 1946. A lighthearted reworking of the Faust legend, Madam, Will You Walk? closed out of town when produced by the Playwrights' Company in 1939, but was more warmly received as the first production of the Phoenix Theatre in 1953.

Shortly after his death his colleagues at the Playwrights' Company founded in his honor the Sidney Howard Memorial Award. The award consisted of a prize of $1,500 given to a young playwright without notable successes who had shown promise in a New York production. The inaugural prize was given to Robert Ardrey in recognition of his play Thunder Rock.

Howard was posthumously inducted into the American Theatre Hall of Fame in 1981.

Selected works

Swords (1921)

They Knew What They Wanted (1924)

Lucky Sam Carver (1925)

Ned McCobb's Daughter (1926)

The Silver Cord (1926)

Half Gods (1929)

S.S. Tenacity (1929): adaptation

Marseilles (1930)

Arrowsmith (1931): adaptation

Michel Auclair (1932): adaptation

Yellow Jack (1934)

Dodsworth (1934)

Ode to Liberty (1934)

Paths of Glory (1935): adaptation

The Ghost of Yankee Doodle (1937)

Gone With The Wind (1939) (Screenplay of Margaret Mitchell's work of the same name) (posthumous Academy Award for Best Adaptation)