Akins, Zoë

Akins, Zoë (1886–1958), playwright. She was born in Humansville, Missouri, and made her professional writing debut with the one‐actor The Magical City (1916). Many critics saw great promise in Papa (1919), her comedy about a father who attempts to save his faltering fortune by marrying off his daughters; but her reputation was established by the success of Déclassée (1919), about a woman who abandons home and husband. Akins met with varying success with such plays as Daddy's Gone A‐Hunting (1921), which depicted the consequences of a man's desertion of his family; The Varying Shore (1921), the history of a courtesan told in flashbacks in reverse chronological order; The Texas Nightingale (also known as Greatness) (1922), about the troubled life of an opera singer; A Royal Fandango (1923), in which a promiscuous princess is brought to her senses; and a series of adaptations of foreign plays: The Moon‐Flower (1924), First Love (1926), The Crown Prince (1927), The Love Duel (1929), and South of Siam (1929). A bawdy comedy about gold‐digging ex‐Follies girls, The Greeks Had a Word for It (1930), was a huge success; and she won a Pulitzer Prize for her dramatization of Edith Wharton's The Old Maid (1935). Thereafter, however, her adaptations and such original plays as O Evening Star (1936) and Mrs. January and Mr. X (1944) met largely with indifference. While many of her early plays shocked audiences by their candor, changing moral codes have dulled their sharpness. Nevertheless, her works can be perceived as urbane, with a superior flare for dramatic situations.