Southern & Coastal Maine
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Portland’s Owen Gould Davis by James Nalley
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A most prolific playwright
etween 1922 and 1945, a Portland-born man became a busy and popular playwright on Broadway in New York City. In fact, he wrote more than 200 scripts, with at least 75 produced on stage, making him the most prolific playwright in the pre-television era. Surprisingly, despite such accolades and even a Pulitzer Prize for Drama, his name has been overshadowed by many of his contemporaries, such as poet Robert Frost (1874-1963) and novelist Jack London (1876-1916), and somewhat forgotten in the field of theater. Owen Gould Davis was born in Portland on January 29, 1874. However, the family moved to Bangor, where
he lived until he was 15. His interest in writing plays came early and he often wrote them for his eight siblings, who performed them in the town. After graduating from high school, he attended the University of Tennessee for one year (1888-1889) and then transferred to Harvard University, where he graduated in three years. Interestingly, his time in Tennessee and Massachusetts was not as memorable to him as his success as a playwright. For example, in his autobiography titled I’d Like to Do It Again (1931), he stated the following: “When I was about 15, my father’s business took him to the Cumberland Mountains in southern Kentucky…and he took my mother and the
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younger children with him, sending my older brother to Massachusetts Tech [MIT] and me to Harvard. For some queer reason, the memory of the years I spent at Harvard is vague and shadowy.” However, he was active with the Harvard Society of Arts drama organization. For the first two decades of his playwriting career, Davis produced melodramas that followed a certain formula. For instance, according to the Encyclopedia of American Drama, his plays all contained “life-threatening, visually exciting predicaments out of which the good emerged at the ultimate expense of the villains who put them there.” Moreover, as stated in the article Fame,
