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WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY (1869-1910)

The following biography was originally published in The British and American Drama of Today. Barrett H. Clark. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1915. p. 258.

William Vaughn Moody was born at Spencer, Indiana, in 1869. He was educated at Harvard. For some years he wrote poems and poetic dramas, while he filled the position of professor of English at the University of Chicago. The Great Divide -- originally A Sabine Woman -- was produced in 1906. The Faith Healer, a failure, was produced three years later. Moody died in 1910.

Moody is a man of one play, yet so full of promise was The Great Divide, so American in the best sense, that his early death cannot but be the source of the deepest regret. He had within him the instinct of the dramatist, together with the conscience and taste of an artist. The poet in him felt the romance and beauty of the East and West in America, and he combined felicity of language with stirring incidents and an interesting if questionable problem. In The Faith Healer he was led astray by an idea; still, the play was an advance in so far as it showed greater unity and a firmer grasp of his idea than did The Great Divide. Moody took American drama where Augustus Thomas left it, and pointed a way at least to what possibilities lay beyond.


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