Sidney Howard

Sidney Coe Howard (June 26, 1891 – August 23, 1939) was an American playwright, dramatist and screenwriter. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1925 and a posthumous Academy Award in 1940 for the screenplay for Gone with the Wind.

Sidney Howard was born in Oakland, California, the son of Helen Louise (née Coe) and John Lawrence Howard. He is a descendant of Robert Coe, a 17th-century colonist who migrated to America from England. He 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.^{[citation needed]}

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.

In 1922, Howard married actress Clare Eames (1896–1930), who had played the female lead in Swords. She later starred in Howard's Lucky Sam McCarver (1925) and Ned McCobb's Daughter (1926) on Broadway and The Silver Cord in London (1927). The couple separated in 1927, and Howard's anger at the disintegration of his marriage is reflected in his bitter satire of modern matrimony, Half Gods (1929).