Owen Davis – Icebound: ”I don’t know as I dare to trust those boys”

Owen Gould Davis was born on the 29th January 1874 into a large family in Portland, Maine before the family relocated to Bangor where Davis would stay until he was a teenager.

From his early years Davis was an avid playwright and would often write plays for his 8 siblings who would then perform them.

He enrolled at the University of Tennessee in 1888 before transferring to Harvard in 1890 to complete his degree. Whilst there he was an active member of their Society of Arts drama organization.

During his long career Davis wrote some 200 plays, an incredible output by any standard. The first two decades were mainly formulaic melodramas that followed a formula.

‘Through the Breakers’ his first play, debuted in Bridgeport, Connecticut in 1897 and would run for three years. Davis’s first Broadway production opened on 17th September 1900: ‘Reaping the Whirlwind’ Altogether some 75 Broadway shows were written by him or under his pen-name John Oliver. He would later add the pseudonyms Martin Hurley, Arthur J. Lamb, Walter Lawrence and Robert Wayne.

Soon after he married the actress Elizabeth Drury Breyer, and together they had two sons.

Prior to the First World War, he wrote racy sketches of the high jinks and low life of New York for the Police Gazette under the name of Ike Swift, many were set in the Tenderloin district of Manhattan.

In 1919, he was the first elected president of the Dramatists Guild of America.

A Pulitzer Prize was his achievement in 1923 for his magnificent play ‘Icebound’.

Hollywood made the call and Davis went to work at Paramount Pictures for three well paid years working on such films as ‘They Had to See Paris’ (1929) and ‘So This Is London’ (1930)’.

Davis also managed to write two autobiographies: ‘I’d Like to Do It Again’ and ‘My First Fifty Years in the Theatre’.

He spent three years of his later life in hospital battling a long-term illness.

On the 13th October 1956, Owen Gould Davis died in New York City at age 82.