Davis, Owen

(1874-1956)

   Born in Portland, Maine, Owen Davis attended Harvard University and after exhausting his youthful desire to be a writer of blank-verse tragedy, he became one of the most successful writers of melodrama and comedy during the first three decades of the 20th century. He may have written as many as 200 plays for stock and touring companies, the best of which was Through the Breakers (1899). Davis's first Broadway contribution, The Battle of Port Arthur (1908), was a musical spectacle produced at the Hippodrome. Although Making Good (1912), his first straight play produced in New York, failed, he had better luck with his 1913 play, The Family Cupboard, and subsequent works, including Sinners (1915), Forever After (1918), and Opportunity (1920). When Davis switched to serious drama with The Detour (1921), he found critical approval as well. Icebound, a drama of an avaricious family disinherited by its matriarch, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923. Most of Davis's subsequent plays were comedies or in the melodramatic style of his early work. Among these, The Nervous Wreck (1923) and Mr. and Mrs. North (1941) were popular successes, but the style was considered outmoded by 1930. In 1936, Davis collaborated with his son, Donald, on an adaptation of Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome.*