Owen Dodson

Writer and educator

• Born: November 28, 1914
• Birthplace: Brooklyn, New York
• Died: June 21, 1983
• Place of death: New York, New York

An influential poet, playwright, and novelist, Dodson is remembered for his varied and brilliant contributions to American literature. Although he received little popular recognition in his own time, Dodson was rediscovered by academics studying the work of Harlem Renaissance poets.

Early Life

Owen Vincent Dodson was born to Nathaniel and Sarah Dodson on November 28, 1914, in Brooklyn, New York. He was the ninth child born into an impoverished family; his father worked as a journalist, a teacher at a Baptist Sunday school, and an elevator operator. Nathaniel also briefly served as chairman of the National Negro Press Association and introduced his son to the writings of prominent African American intellectuals.

Dodson’s childhood was marked by a series of deaths in his family, a traumatic experience that would color his writing. Four of his nine siblings died in childhood, and his mother died after a series of strokes before Dodson was eleven years old. When Dodson was twelve, his father died as well.

After graduating from Jefferson High School in New York, Dodson received a scholarship to attend Bates College, where he earned his bachelor’s degree. Although Dodson was openly homosexual for most of his life, he was engaged for a short time to a female student at Bates. In 1937, he won a grant for his writing from the General Education Board, the first of many awards that Dodson would amass over his long career. On the strength of his writing, Dodson was accepted at the Yale School of Drama, where he received a master of fine arts degree in 1939.

Life’s Work

At Yale, Dodson produced his first notable plays, including Divine Comedy (1938), The Garden of Time (1939), and Amistad (1939). The Garden of Time is a reworking of Euripides’ play Medea, set in the prewar South; Dodson would revisit the story again with 1959’s Medea in Africa. Divine Comedy was a dramatic biography of preacher and con artist Father Divine, who built a large following during the Great Depression. Dodson’s work led him to accept a position as a lecturer at Spelman College in 1939.

In 1940, Dodson joined the Navy, in which he served for two years. While in the military, he staged plays and wrote poems featured in 1941’s The Negro Caravan. After returning to the United States in 1942, Dodson wrote and produced the playNew World A-Coming (1944), which became a popular success. He was appointed executive secretary of the Committee for Negro Mass Education, which he renamed the Committee for Mass Education in Race Relations. Although Dodson made concerted efforts to correct the stereotyped and offensive portrayals of minorities in Hollywood films, he was stymied by the film industry’s fear of appearing overly leftist at a time of rising anticommunist sentiment.

Dodson’s first collection of poems, Powerful Long Ladder (1946), caused a stir upon its publication and was condemned by some academics for its overtly racial perspective. Unlike Dodson’s plays, it was not a popular or critical success at the time of its publication. In 1947, Dodson became an associate professor of English at Howard University, but he soon joined the university’s nascent drama department. He wrote many more plays, including 1948’s Bayou Legend, an adaptation of the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt (1867).

In 1951, Dodson’s autobiographical novel Boy at the Window was released to great acclaim. The next year, after receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship, he began working on a follow-up. The book, which included a more surrealistic turn that broke with the naturalistic style of its predecessor, eventually was published as Come Home Early, Child in 1977.

Throughout his life, Dodson faced homophobia and racism, and he developed a dependency on alcohol. His alcoholism, combined with arthritis, ultimately impaired his work to the point that he was forced to leave the faculty of Howard University in 1967. Although he was unable to secure a regular teaching position afterward, Dodson continued to write, publishing another collection of poetry, The Confession Stone, in 1970. In 1978, he wrote The Harlem Book of the Dead, a collection of poetry presented alongside photographs of funerals.

Dodson died in New York City on June 21, 1983, after struggling with cardiovascular disease, a result of his years of alcoholism. He was sixty-eight years old.

Significance

Over the course of his career, Dodson wrote thirty-seven stage productions, twenty-seven of which were produced. He received numerous accolades, including a General Education Grant (1938), a Rosenwald Fellowship (1944), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1953), and a Rockefeller Grant (1969). Although he became less productive in his later years, he remained dedicated to his craft and believed that one of his later works, Confession Stone, was his best writing.

Bibliography

Dodson, Owen. “An Interview with Owen Dodson.” Interview by Charles H. Rowell. Callaloo 20, no. 3 (Summer, 1997): 627-639. A lengthy interview with Dodson that touches on many of his works and includes unbroken passages of Dodson’s recollections that give a strong impression of his personality and sensibilities.

Hatch, James V. Sorrow Is the Only Faithful One: The Life of Owen Dodson. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995. This intelligent and intensely personal biography is the first full-length study of Dodson’s life and work.

Peterson, Bernard L., Jr. “The Legendary Owen Dodson of Howard University: His Contributions to the American Theatre.” The Crisis 86, no. 9 (November, 1979): 373-378. Thorough, detailed tribute to Dodson that describes many of his plays and the circumstances of their writing and performance.