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Hopwood, Avery, 1882-1928

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WPA Poster of The Alarm Clock by Avery Hopwood
WPA Poster of The Alarm Clock by Avery Hopwood

Cleveland-born Avery Hopwood (May 28, 1882 - July 1, 1928) was one of the most successful playwrights of the Jazz Age, having four plays running simultaneously on Broadway in 1920. He wrote comedies and farces such as Nobody's Widow (1910), starring Blanche Bates; Fair and Warmer (1915), starring Madge Kennedy; The Gold Diggers (1919), starring Ina Claire; Ladies Night in a Turkish Bath (with Charlton Andrews), 1920, starring Charlie Ruggles; the famous mystery play The Bat (with Mary Roberts Rinehart), 1920; Getting Gertie's Garter (with Wilson Collison), 1921, starring Hazel Dawn; The Demi-Virgin, 1921, also starring Hazel Dawn; The Alarm Clock, 1923; The Best People (with David Gray), 1924, and the song-farce Naughty Cinderella, 1925, starring Irene Bordoni. A clever, adroit, masterful craftsman who wrote to the tastes of his public, Hopwood was inexhaustible in his work ethic.

Sadly, personal troubles related to his homosexuality and his inability to break from the formula writing that made him a success led to his early death in 1928 at age 46 when he suffered a heart attack while swimming at Juan-les-Pins, France. Throughout his life, Hopwood worked on a novel that he hoped would "expose" the strictures the commercial theater machine imposed on playwrights, but the manuscript was never published.

The terms of Hopwood's will left a substantial portion of his estate to his alma mater, the University of Michigan for the establishment of the Avery Hopwood and Jule [his mother] Hopwood Creative Writing Awards. The bequest stipulated: "It is especially desired that students competing for prizes shall be allowed the widest possible latitude, and that the new, the unusual, and the radical shall be especially encouraged." Famous Hopwood award winners include Robert Haydn, Marge Piercy, Arthur Miller, Betty Smith, Lawrence Kasdan, John Ciardi, Mary Gaitskill, Nancy Willard, and Frank O’Hara.

Further reading

  • Avery Hopwood: His Life and Plays, by Jack Sharrar (McFarland,1989; University of Michigan Press, 1998)
  • Broadway, by Brooks Atkinson. NY: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1974.
  • Matinee Tomorrow, by Ward Morehouse. NY: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1948.
  • Posing a Threat: Flappers, Chorus Girls, and Other Brazen Performers of the American 1920s, by Angela Latham. Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press, 2000.
  • The Splendid Drunken Twenties: Carl Van Vechten Selections from the Daybooks, 1922-1930. Edited by Bruce Kellner. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003.

External links


This biographical information was gathered from the Avery_Hopwood page, courtesy of the Wikipedia project.

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