author
Charles Goddard
1879–1951
A lively early-20th-century writer who moved easily from newspaper work to Broadway and then to silent-film adventure, helping shape some of the era’s best-known popular entertainment. He is especially remembered for The Perils of Pauline and for fiction tied to his stage successes.
3 Audiobooks
The Ghost Breaker: A Novel Based Upon the Play
by Charles Goddard, Paul Dickey
The Perils of Pauline
by Charles Goddard
The Ghost Breaker: A Melodramatic Farce in Four Acts
by Paul Dickey, Charles Goddard
About the author
Born in Portland, Maine, in 1879, Charles William Goddard was an American journalist, playwright, author, and screenwriter. He became widely known in the 1910s for plays written with Paul Dickey, including The Ghost Breaker, and he later adapted some of that work for fiction and film.
Goddard is best remembered today for writing the scenario for The Perils of Pauline (1914), one of the defining adventure serials of the silent era. His career shows how closely publishing, theater, and early cinema were linked at the time: he wrote for the stage, published novels connected to his dramatic work, and helped bring fast-paced popular storytelling to the screen.
He died in 1951 in Miami, Florida. For listeners interested in writers who worked across several forms at once, he offers a glimpse of a moment when modern mass entertainment was still being invented.