David Low Dodge

David Low Dodge 1774-1852, American merchant and pacifist, b. Brooklyn, Conn. In 1815 he founded the New York Peace Society, possibly the first such organization to be established. In 1828 other peace societies joined with it to form the American Peace Society; Dodge served as a director and as a member of the executive committee until 1836.

Boyden, David (Dodge) (b Westport, Conn., 1910; d Berkeley, Calif., 1986). Amer. musicologist and expert on string instruments. Teacher at Univ. of Calif. 1938–75 (prof. from 1955). Author of History of Violin-playing from its Origins to 1761 (1965), the standard work on the topic.

Mamet, David (1947– ), Chicago-born dramatist whose work is distinguished by its attentions to the rhythms of blue-collar speech and the theme of how low-life criminality mirrors the world of big business. American Buffalo (1975) follows the bungled attempts of three petty crooks to pull off a robbery, while Glengarry Glen Ross (1983) adopts a similar plot to a group of real-estate salesmen. Often criticised for sexism, his work is unafraid to address crises in gender relations, with plays such as Sexual Perversity in Chicago (1974), which satirizes the vacuity of male sexual bravado, and Oleanna (1992), which dramatized the misunderstandings between a professor and his student in a complex narrative of sexual harassment. He has written widely for the cinema (The Postman Always Rings Twice, 1981; The Untouchables, 1983), and has since gone on to direct films of his own. He has also written two novels, The Village (1994), a portrayal of hunting which recalls Hemingway, and The Old Religion (1997), a fictional reconstruction of the lynching of a Jewish factory owner falsely accused of the rape and murder of a Southern white girl.