Fitch, (William) Clyde

Fitch, [William] Clyde (1865–1909), playwright. He was born in Elmira, New York, the son of a Union army officer and a Maryland belle. Fitch's “sissy” manners made him a loner at school, but the same effeminacy won him major women's roles in the dramatic club at Amherst College. Arriving in New York to seek a career as an architect and interior decorator, he wrote a number of stories and short plays, which were afterwards successfully performed at the Boston Museum. He also made a number of important theatrical friends, including the Times critic Edward A. Dithmar, who, along with William Winter, urged him to write Beau Brumell (1890) for the celebrated actor Richard Mansfield. The play was an immediate hit and launched Fitch's career. During the next nineteen years he wrote nearly sixty plays, thirty‐three of them original, and the remainder translations of foreign plays or adaptations of novels. Among his more important works were Nathan Hale (1898), The Moth and the Flame (1898), The Cowboy and the Lady (1899), Barbara Frietchie (1899), The Climbers (1901), Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines (1901), The Girl with the Green Eyes (1902), The Truth (1907), and The City (1909). Fitch is considered the finest American playwright at the turn of the 20th century. His range and variety are startling, as is his prolificacy. Some works are domestic melodramas, others social critiques, still others historical romances. Quite probably his most glaring fault by modern standards was his contrived happy endings. Thus, the jealous woman in The Girl with the Green Eyes is thwarted in her suicide attempt, and the lying girl in The Truth is ultimately brought to her senses. These conclusions were not the result of haste on Fitch's part, but of his need to please contemporary audiences and thereby provide him with the income required for his notoriously luxurious way of life. Arthur Hobson Quinn has pointed to Fitch's three salient virtues as “the ability to visualize any place or period in terms of its social values, the power to incarnate virtues and vices in characters who are essentially dramatic, and the gift of writing clever dialogue.” Walter Prichard Eaton added to this list Fitch's dramatized observations of small details such as the thumping of steampipes in one play and the sound of an object falling down an airshaft in another. He concluded, “If we took Fitch's worlds and correctly illustrated them, they would give to future generations a better idea of American life from 1890 to 1910 than newspapers or historical records.” Certainly Fitch's best plays, whatever their flaws, remain gripping reading and are probably exceptionally playable even today. Biography: Clyde Fitch and His Letters, Montrose J. Moses and Virginia Gerson, 1924.