Sidney Howard

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Sidney Howard 1909

Sidney Howard (born June 26, 1891 in Oakland , California , † August 23, 1939 in Tyringham , Massachusetts ) was an American playwright who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the Oscar .

Life

Howard studied at the University of California and Harvard University , after he served in the First World War . After the war he worked as a journalist and translator while he was writing his first pieces. The politically liberal Howard rose to become one of the most popular American playwrights of the 1920s and 1930s, not least because of his high productivity. His first play Swords premiered on Broadway in 1921 . With his third play They Knew What They Wanted he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1925 . The piece, which was later filmed several times and performed many times again, tells of an aging and not very handsome winegrower who proposes marriage to a waitress by letter, but sends her the picture of his young employee. In 1927 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters .

From the end of the 1920s, Hollywood also discovered his pieces as the basis for films, which led to him also working as a screenwriter in the 1930s with the start of talkies . His scripts for two literary adaptations based on novels by Sinclair Lewis , with whom he was also a private friend, were very successful . Howard never moved to Los Angeles , instead he lived in seclusion on his farm in Massachusetts. He wrote his most famous screenplay for the classic film Gone With the Wind (1939). The producer David O. Selznick , convinced that he was the most talented living playwright in the USA, hired him to dramatize the 1000-page novel.

Howard was married to actress Clare Eames (1894–1930) from 1922 until her untimely death , their daughter Jennifer Howard (1925–1993) later also became an actress. In 1931 Sidney Howard was married to Polly Damrosch, the daughter of the German-American composer Walter Damrosch , in his second marriage . Sidney Howard died - before the premiere of Gone with the Wind - in August 1939 on his farm in an accident with his tractor.

Posthumously he was awarded the Oscar for the screenplay for Gone With the Wind . Howard was the only screenwriter to win an Oscar for Gone With the Wind , although his script was later revised by other writers. He was the first author to receive the Pulitzer Prize and the Oscar in the course of his career.

Stage works (selection)

  • Swords (1921)
  • They Knew What They Wanted (1924)
  • Lucky Sam Carver (1925)
  • Ned McCobb's Daughter (1926)
  • The Silver Cord (1926)
  • Half Gods (1929)
  • Marseilles (1930)
  • The Late Christopher Bean (1932)
  • Yellow Jack (1934)
  • Dodsworth (1934)
  • Ode to Liberty (1934)
  • The Ghost of Yankee Doodle (1937)

Filmography (selection)

As a screenwriter

As the author of the template

literature

  • Gewirtz, Arthur: Sidney Howard and Clare Eames: American Theater's Perfect Couple of the 1920s. Jefferson, MO: McFarland Publishers, 2004.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Arthur Gewirtz: Sidney Howard and Clare Eames: American Theater's Perfect Couple of the 1920s . McFarland, 2004, ISBN 978-0-7864-1751-3 ( google.de [accessed June 28, 2020]).
  2. ^ Members: Sidney Howard. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed April 4, 2019 .
  3. ^ Mark Schorer, Sinclair Lewis: An American Life (New York: McGraw Hill, 1959), pp. 574, 614, 616.
  4. ↑ admin: Accident Kills Gone With the Wind's Screenwriter | Pauline Bartel. Retrieved June 28, 2020 (American English).
personal data
SURNAME Howard, Sidney
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American screenwriter and playwright
DATE OF BIRTH June 26, 1891
PLACE OF BIRTH Oakland , California , USA
DATE OF DEATH August 23, 1939
Place of death Tyringham , Massachusetts , USA