William Vaughn Moody

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Moody, William Vaughn (1869–1910),Indiana playwright and poet, graduated from Harvard (1893) and taught English there (1894–95) and at the University of Chicago (1895–99, 1901–7). His first poetic play, The Masque of Judgment (1900), deals with the conflict between man and God and the rightful exercise of man's free will, which leads him to rebel. A second verse drama, The Fire Bringer (1904), stresses man's duty of rebellion in the story of Prometheus. These works were to have been brought to philosophic completion in a third play dealing with the reconciliation of God and man through the creation of woman. This part of the trilogy, The Death of Eve (1912), remained incomplete at Moody's death, and none of the works was ever produced. The Great Divide (1906), originally produced as A Sabine Woman (1906) and published (1909) under its second title, is a play concerned with the contrast between Ruth Jordan, a modern product of inherited Puritan traditions and inhibitions, and Stephen Ghent, a free individualist representative of the frontier West. This was followed by another prose play, The Faith Healer (1909), which was less successful because of its exalted idealism. It concerns Ulrich Michaelis, an occult healer whose power is lost when he gains the earthly love of Rhoda Williams, but regained when he purifies his love in a higher, unselfish realization that her anguish, like that of the whole world, needs healing. Moody's lyric Poems (1901) also recognizes that men's spirits are plagued and possessed by confused desires, but he voices a highly spiritual and idealistic belief in the greatness of their eventual destiny. His Poems and Plays were collected in two volumes (1912), and collections of his Letters have been published (1913, 1935).

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.

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).