Sidney Howard

• Born: June 26, 1891
• Birthplace: Oakland, California
• Died: August 23, 1939
• Place of death: Tyringham, Massachusetts

Other Literary Forms

Although best known for his plays, Sidney Howard also translated and adapted a number of works. In his early years, Howard worked as a literary editor and wrote, with Robert Dunn, a collection of articles on strikebreaking agencies entitled The Labor Spy (1921). In 1924, he published four stories under the single title Three Flights Up. Like Robert E. Sherwood and Clifford Odets, Howard devoted much of his time to writing screenplays, primarily for Samuel Goldwyn’s studio. With Wallace Smith, he wrote the script for Bulldog Drummond (1929), based on stories by the British writer H. C. McNeile, who wrote under the pen name “Sapper.” Howard also adapted two novels by Sinclair Lewis, Arrowsmith (1925) in 1931 and Dodsworth (1929) in 1936, to the screen. For his 1939 film adaptation of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936), Howard won an Academy Award.

Achievements

Although Sidney Howard contributed little that was unique to American drama, his reputation rests chiefly on his ability to focus on limited, narrow subjects and, in the process, to reveal something essential about the human condition. He created a number of substantial and effective plays, characterized by sound craftsmanship, honesty, and skill. In limiting himself to dramatizing concrete, specific situations, he created sharp, telling vignettes about particular people in varied yet specific settings.

Howard’s achievements are seen in his expert characterization and in his emphasis on social perspective, which helped his plays transcend the limitations of contemporary drama. In 1925, his efforts were recognized; he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for They Knew What They Wanted.

Biography

Sidney Coe Howard was the son of John Lawrence Howard and Helen Louise Coe. His paternal grandfather, born of English parents, had emigrated from Antrim, Ireland, in 1848 and had settled in Philadelphia. After attending public schools in Oakland, California, Howard was graduated from the University of California in 1915 and then attended George Pierce Baker’s Workshop 47 at Harvard University. During this time, Howard began his early collaborative efforts with Edward Sheldon, who had a great influence on the development of American drama. In 1916, Howard received a master of arts degree from Harvard.

World War I interrupted Howard’s creative career. Inducted into the service in 1916, he served first as an ambulance driver in France and in the Balkans and then as a captain and fighter pilot in the newly formed Air Service. In 1919, Howard joined the editorial staff of the old humor magazine Life in New York. Three years later, he became the literary editor of Life and was writing and adapting plays. In 1921, he married Clare Eames, an actress, and they had a child, Clare Jenness Howard.

Howard’s determined interest in the daily lives of people led him to work in 1923 as a special investigative reporter and fiction writer for The New Republic and International Magazine. Before settling into the style of social drama that eventually brought him success, Howard wrote his first play, Swords, which failed, and collaborated with Sheldon on Bewitched.

Following Howard’s recognition as a playwright for They Knew What They Wanted, he continued over the next five years to write or translate and adapt several plays. Three of these, Dodsworth, Paths of Glory, and The Late Christopher Bean, are among his best contributions to American drama.

Lucky Sam McCarver opened at the Playhouse Theatre in New York on October 21, 1925, and capitalized on the spectacle of affluent life among New York’s socialites. The play is an ironic statement on that society and those who aspire to it. Ned McCobb’s Daughter and The Silver Cord both came to New York theaters in 1926. With its well-drawn characters, The Silver Cord is one of the outstanding social-thesis plays in American drama. Neither Salvation nor Half Gods was successful, and after 1929 Howard concentrated on writing screenplays. During the last ten years of his life, Howard continued to write for the stage and achieved moderate success with his adaptation of The Late Christopher Bean and with Alien Corn. Active in theater affairs, Howard served from 1935 to 1937 as president of the Dramatists Guild, and in 1938—along with Sherwood, S. N. Behrman, Maxwell Anderson, and Elmer Rice—he formed the Playwrights’ Producing Company , organized to produce their plays without interference from commercial producers.

In 1930, following the death of Clare Eames, by that time his former wife, Howard married Leopoldine Blaine Damrosch, the daughter of musician Walter Damrosch. They had two children: a daughter, Sidney Damrosch Howard, and a son, Walter Damrosch Howard. Sidney Howard died on August 23, 1939, as a result of a tractor accident on his Massachusetts farm.

Analysis

Sidney Howard was neither an innovator in dramatic form nor a particularly profound writer, and he readily admitted these facts. He was content to “get a kind of glamour around reality,” to dare less and achieve more. He was nevertheless a substantial playwright of considerable theatrical skill and imagination who stepped into the ongoing stream of social drama in America and produced at least two major plays in that genre.

They Knew What They Wanted

Despite a tendency toward preachiness, They Knew What They Wanted is an important play for its humanity and for its insight into social morality. A modern version of Dante’s story of the love of Paolo and Francesca, it demonstrated Howard’s ability to write a compact, effective play.

Tony, a sixty-year-old Italian winegrower, proposes by mail to Amy, a young waitress, whom he has seen once and admired. They correspond, and Amy asks for a photograph of him. Instead, he sends one of Joe, his handsome young hired hand. On his way to the station to pick up Amy, Tony has an automobile accident and is injured. When Amy arrives at the house, she mistakes Joe for Tony, and on discovering that Tony is to be her husband, she is shocked. After the wedding party, Amy, miserable, is left alone with Joe, and they make love. The discovery three months later that Amy is pregnant, Tony’s resultant anger, his struggle with his pride, and his final acceptance of and triumph over the trouble, as well as the resolution for all three characters of this dilemma, make up the heart of the play. All three characters, in the end, know and get what they want, and all are, in the end, satisfied.

In Tony, Howard created his most successful character. The most appealing and most real figure in the play, Tony is also the one most able to deal with the exigencies of the world. He discovers that he can accept Amy’s child, love Amy, and find joy in his new family. He becomes not the most miserable of men but a “most happy fella.” The other two characters make similar discoveries: Amy discovers that she really cares for Tony and wants to be his wife, and Joe finds that he really values his freedom. The play ends satisfactorily, for the characters and for the audience.

The Silver Cord

The Silver Cord, although it also suffers from preachment, has a profound effect on audiences, delving into a deep and often hidden layer of human emotion. Mrs. Phelps, a domineering mother, is in a struggle to possess the love of her two sons and to exclude from their affections the women whom they love. She successfully destroys the love of Robert and his fiancée, Hester, but fails to break up the marriage of her older son, David, and Christina, a more determined woman than Hester and more of a match for Mrs. Phelps. Howard expresses his antipathy toward filial duty grounded on pathological dependence through Christina, who says, “An embryological accident is no ground for honour,” and through Hester, who says of children, “Have ’em. Love ’em. And then leave ’em be.”

The play dramatizes this conflict—between a “professional” mother and an independent and ambitious wife. Both deserve some sympathy even as each struggles desperately for the fulfillment of her own selfish needs. Christina, however, is not morally disfigured, as is Mrs. Phelps. Christina’s concern for her own career is balanced by her more healthy concern for the life of her unborn child and for the freedom to live that she knows is necessary for her own happiness and for David’s.

Mrs. Phelps is singularly diabolical, and this makes her a very interesting character; she stalks her sons like prey, weakening their other loyalties with innuendo and crafty appeals for sympathy, then pouncing when these loyalties have been sufficiently worn down. The play is marred, however, by too much weakness in the sons, by the lack of any real dramatic discovery on Christina’s part, by the lack of credibility in David’s late and undermotivated decision to leave in the end, and, finally, by the playwright’s preachiness. By the end of the play, the audience is satisfied: Christina has defeated the villainess after an intense battle, she has helped to free innocent Hester, and she has gained her own personal objective. Christina, however, seems a bit too much like Mrs. Phelps for comfort, and David may well be merely stepping out of one trap and into another. As a social drama with a Freudian thesis, however—the level on which the play was most generally understood—it was successful and powerfully dramatic on the stage.

Lucky Sam McCarver and Ned McCobb’s Daughter

During the 1920’s, Howard adapted several plays and wrote several more. Both Lucky Sam McCarver and Ned McCobb’s Daughter—one a theatrical failure and the other a success—show elements of the social drama at which Howard excelled. Each is concerned with a strong character who faces a series of frustrating social situations and who reacts powerfully to those conditions and frustrations.

Lucky Sam McCarver starts as an analysis of cold, materialistic Sam McCarver but is more effective as the story of a woman who desperately wants love from a man who has only money to give. Sam, who is hardened in his worship of money, frankly uses his wife and her name and sees nothing beyond his growing empire. Having lost human compassion and the ability to feel, he can only think and contrive; in Howard’s world, which is essentially a world of action and feeling rather than thought, Sam has no value.

Unlike the comedy Ned McCobb’s Daughter, in which social conditions provide the background for Carrie to show her superiority of character and her Yankee determination, Lucky Sam McCarver is an unhappy social drama about irresponsible people: a frustrated woman and a materialistic man who will always be “disappointed in the universe.” Howard’s characters usually know what they want, but Howard invariably controls their destinies. Although he frequently tempers his moral judgments with true mercy, within his definitions of right and wrong he is completely conventional in meting out rewards and punishments, emphasizing his preference for a “satisfactory” ending to a play.

Yellow Jack

In the 1930’s, Howard wrote and adapted several plays, bringing his total output to more than twenty-five plays. Worthy of mention is Yellow Jack, written with Paul de Kruif and based on de Kruif’s book Microbe Hunters (1926). Although not a popular success when first staged, it has been frequently revived. Set in and around an army barracks near Havana, Cuba, it follows Major Walter Reed and his colleagues’ fight to isolate the cause of yellow fever, quietly tracing the events and highlighting the nobility of the characters involved in the enterprise and the sacrifices they made. Again, Howard keeps the focus of the play narrow, allowing no extraneous “love interest” or other episodes to interfere with the progress of the action.

Character Development

Howard found his greatest success in creating social drama from a mixture of realism, melodrama, and comedy. His major interest in his plays, however, was his characters. Psychological interpretation of character is an essential part of his best plays. More exuberant than thoughtful, he was frequently satisfied to have his characters simply react emotionally to strong stimuli.

In They Knew What They Wanted, for example, Tony tells Amy: “What you have done is mistake in da head, not in da heart.” For Howard, emotion is more important than intellect. Similarly, Christina in The Silver Cord at first relies on reason to resolve her difficulties with Mrs. Phelps, but her attempts fail; intellect is not enough.

Although he generally followed an established trend in American drama, Howard, in his best plays, created strong, compelling characters, interacting in situations that allowed his drama to transcend the limitations of the merely personal. The individualistic, life-affirming spirit of his work was a welcome addition to the social drama of the 1920’s.

Bibliography

Bonin, Jane F. Major Themes in Prize-Winning American Drama. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1975. This insightful analysis of Howard’s plays shows that he was interested in staging the self-made man and the success ethic as well as depicting women in various roles in marriage and society. Marriages are grim, yet American women are pragmatic; they need a husband for security, no matter how intelligent and strong they might be.

Leff, Leonard J. “Gone with the Wind and Hollywood’s Racial Politics.” Atlantic Monthly 284, no. 6 (December, 1999): 106-114. Discusses producer David O. Selznick’s efforts to remain true to Margaret Mitchell’s novel, adapted for the screen by Howard, while improving the portrayal of African Americans in the film.

White, Sydney Howard. Sidney Howard. Boston: Twayne, 1977. This well-conceived monograph offers a biographical and critical survey of the early essays and stories as well as of the major stage plays and screenplays. Quotations from letters, articles, and reviews help to shape the final evaluation of Howard’s corpus. The endnotes present information on performances. The chronological table and the bibliography are useful.