Davis, Owen

Davis, Owen (1874–1956), playwright. Born in Portland, Maine, the Harvard‐educated Davis proved unsuccessful at blank‐verse tragedy, so, to support his family, he began churning out cheap melodramas for popular touring companies. Finishing them at the rate of one every second or third week, he wrote over two hundred, with titles such as Edna, the Pretty Typewriter; Nellie, the Beautiful Cloak Model; Driven from Home; and Convict 999. In his autobiography Davis called them “practically motion pictures,” observing, “One of the first tricks I learned was that my plays must be written for an audience who, owing to huge, uncarpeted, noisy theaters, couldn't always hear the words and who, a large percentage of them having only recently landed in America, couldn't have understood them in any case. I therefore wrote for the eye rather than the ear.” When dialogue was necessary he filled it with “noble sentiments so dear to audiences of that class.” Davis was first represented on Broadway with the Hippodrome musical spectacle The Battle of Port Arthur (1908), and his first regular play to reach New York was Making Good (1912). It was a quick failure, but he scored commercial successes with The Family Cupboard (1913), Sinners (1915), Forever After (1918), and Opportunity (1920). To many playgoers' surprise, Davis then wrote two highly praised dramas: The Detour (1921) and Icebound (1923), the latter winning a Pulitzer Prize. Although several of his other plays, such as The Nervous Wreck (1923) and Mr. and Mrs. North (1941), were commercially profitable, they did not fulfill the promise he briefly displayed. Many of his later works were dramatizations of other writers' stories. Autobiographies: I'd Like to Do It Again, 1931; My First Fifty Years in the Theatre, 1950.