William Vaughn Moody

William Vaughn Moody 1869-1910, American poet and dramatist, b. Spencer, Ind., grad. Harvard, 1893. After writing several verse dramas, Moody achieved wide success with the prose play The Great Divide (produced as A Sabine Woman, 1906). The Faith Healer (1909), however, also written in prose, was less popular. Both his poetry and his plays are noted for their lyricism and philosophical idealism. He also wrote A History of English Literature (1902) with Robert Morss Lovett.

Bibliography: See his poems and plays (2 vol., 1912); studies by M. Halpern (1964) and M. F. Brown (1973).

Moody, William Vaughn (1869–1910), American dramatist, whose work is important in the development of indigenous drama in the United States. Poet, scholar, and educationist, Moody had been for many years a teacher when he decided that his real vocation lay in the theatre. The first of his plays to be staged, by Henry Miller, was The Great Divide (1906), originally known as The Sabine Woman. It was successfully produced in London in 1909, the year in which another of Moody's plays, The Faith Healer, was seen in New York. Both these are written in a dignified, poetic style, and mark the arrival on the American scene of the serious social dramatist, still somewhat melodramatic but moving away from French farce and adaptations of sentimental novelettes. None of his long poetic plays was produced in his lifetime.

Moody, William Vaughn (1869–1910), playwright. The son of a Mississippi riverboat captain, he was born in Spencer, Indiana, and educated at Harvard, where he became the class poet. He later taught both at Harvard and at the University of Chicago before retiring to devote himself to writing poetry and plays. His earliest theatrical works were blank‐verse dramas, The Masque of Judgment (1900) and The Fire Bringer (1904). Neither was produced during his lifetime, although scholars have found merit in both, and only two others were enacted on stage while he was alive. The Great Divide (1906), one of the milestones in the history of American theatre, was seen as an examination of a fundamental native conflict and was an early instance of what Quinn has called the “Drama of Revolt.” The Faith Healer (1909), which centered on a man's attempt to regain divine curative powers, failed, possibly because Moody was too ill to make the requisite revisions. His early death is believed by many scholars to have deprived the theatre of a major voice and to have left it for Eugene O'Neill to bring American drama to maturity a decade later. Biography: Estranging Dawn, Maurice F. Brown, 1973.