author
Lewis Beach
1891–1947
Best known for the hit comedy The Goose Hangs High, this American playwright also wrote one-act plays and stage works that found success from vaudeville to Broadway. His career began while he was a student at Harvard, and his work stayed closely tied to the American theater of the 1910s through the 1940s.
1 Audiobook
Washington Square Plays
by Lewis Beach, Alice Gerstenberg, Edward Goodman, Philip Moeller
About the author
Born in Saginaw, Michigan, in 1891, Lewis Beach was an American playwright and author whose full name was Emmet Lewis Beach Jr. He began writing plays while attending Harvard University, where he was active in student theater and developed the craft that would shape his career.
His first notable success was The Clod, a one-act play first performed in 1916 by the Washington Square Players. He went on to write several stage works, including Ann Vroome, A Square Peg, and Merry Andrew, but he is most often remembered for The Goose Hangs High, a family comedy that became his best-known play and was later adapted for film.
Beach died in 1947. Today he is remembered as a writer who helped bridge the worlds of little theater, popular stage comedy, and early twentieth-century American playwriting.